Region, Race, and Class in the Making of Colombia 9781003381198

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Region, Race, and Class in the Making of Colombia

This pioneering translation of Alfonso Múnera’s seminal work El fracaso de la nación presents a new interpretation and innovative perspective on canonical Colombian history and the failure of the Colombian nation to English-​speaking readers. Mainstream historiography depicts Colombian independence as the achievement of European-​descendent elites only, downplaying the role and importance of regional subaltern classes. Múnera’s well-​researched account challenges theoretical, political, and cultural interventions and shows that these subaltern groups were pivotal to achieving independence from Spain. It was their organizing and pressing for freedom from colonial domination that ultimately brought about independence in Cartagena and later to the whole country. Yet Múnera demonstrates that these differing regional elites meant that a single, coherent unity across New Granada was not possible, a point that would ultimately doom subsequent nation-​building efforts. Offering a truly decolonizing perspective, one that has remained hidden from official accounts of Colombian independence, scholars and researchers in political science, history, sociology, and anthropology will welcome the opportunity to read this work for the first time in translation. Alfonso Múnera is a historian, researcher, lecturer, and former ambassador. Born in Cartagena in 1953, Múnera earned a law degree from the University of Cartagena in 1981 and an MA and PhD in Latin American studies and US history from the University of Connecticut in 1995. In 1981, he began teaching at the University of Cartagena, where he served as vice rector of research (2007–​2010) and founded the International Institute for Caribbean Studies in 2005. Múnera has been a visiting professor in Spain and the United States at institutions such as Pablo de Olavide University (1999), the University of Wisconsin (2003–​ 2004), and the University of Seville (2006). Múnera is one of Latin America’s most recognized and respected historians and in 2010, was named as one of 12 renowned Afro-​Colombians. His critique of the construction of the Colombian nation and the processes of independence, and his criticism of official history make him an outstanding researcher.

Decolonizing the Classics Edited by Bernd Reiter, Texas Tech University

The critique of colonialism and postcolonialism has by now been broadly disseminated and understood. The logical next step in moving beyond colonialism in thought, research, and academic practice is to engage in decolonization efforts. This is currently occurring. However, most of these efforts are still based on the critique of Western centrism and its universalist claims. Instead of adding another layer of critique to Western and northern intellectual domination and epistemological hegemony, Decolonizing the Classics actively inserts non-​Western voices from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific into the canon of classic and seminal works currently taught around the globe. Changó, Decolonizing the African Diaspora Manuel Zapata Olivella, Translated by Jonathan Tittler Colonial Slavery An Abridged Translation Jacob Gorender, Edited by Bernd Reiter, Translated by Alejandro Reyes The Critique of Coloniality Eight Essays Rita Segato, Translated by Ramsey McGlazer Gustavo Esteva A Critique of Development and other essays Gustavo Esteva, Translated by Kathryn Dix Region, Race, and Class in the Making of Colombia Alfonso Múnera

Region, Race, and Class in the Making of Colombia Alfonso Múnera

Designed cover image: Johann Moritz Rugendas First published in English 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Alfonso Múnera Translated by Alejandro Reyes The right of Alfonso Múnera to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Published in Spanish by Banco de la República and El Áncora Editores 1998 ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​46335-​3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​46336-​0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​003-​38119-​8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/​9781003381198 Typeset in Times New Roman by Newgen Publishing UK

To my three women: Fita, Lucía, and Laura

Contents

Series preface: Alfonso Múnera. El Fracaso de la Nación Preface to the English language edition Acknowledgments Introduction

ix xi xv 1

1 New Granada and the problem of central authority

12

2 The Colombian Caribbean: Authority and social control in a frontier region

28

3 Cartagena de Indias: Progress and crisis in a former trading post of enslaved people

43

4 Economic implications of the conflict between Cartagena and Santa Fe de Bogotá

66

5 Cartagena’s struggle for political autonomy

85

6 Black and mulatto artisans and the independence of the Republic of Cartagena, 1810–​1816

107

Conclusions

136

Bibliography Index

141 153

Series preface: Alfonso Múnera. El Fracaso de la Nación

The translation and publication of Alfonso Múnera’s El Fracaso de la Nación, first published in 1998, fits squarely within the mandate of this Special Book Series. It is written by a prominent Afro-​Colombian historian and has achieved the status of a classic in its own language and country, Colombia, where it has been reprinted several times and triggered a whole series of revisionist historical treatments responding, directly, to Múnera’s arguments. He shows that Colombian independence was not only an elite project, but counted on the important mobilization, and agency, of black, brown, and indigenous people. His research focuses mostly on the city of Cartagena, where he lives and works, and points at the absence of a unified national liberation project. He shows that Cartagenan workers and craftsmen had their own vision, and project, of liberty and independence from Spain. They demanded freedom and rights and they organized and mobilized to achieve them. Those subaltern groups were ultimately betrayed by their own, white, elites, but they nevertheless played an important role in achieving independence for Colombia as they provided the numbers, and thus the force, behind independence in Cartagena. Múnera shows that Cartagena, and with it, Colombia’s Caribbean region, had its own independence project and its ordinary people dreamed their own dream, much different from the dreams of Antonio Nariño, Simón Bolívar, and Francisco de Paula Santander. When it came to imagining the nation, Múnera’s book makes it clear that different groups, living in different and very disconnected regions of the country, imagined very different Colombian nations. In this book, Múnera is thus taking issue with the widely accepted proposal, advanced by Benedict Anderson, that nations are imagined, and thus forged, by elites only.

Preface to the English language edition

More than two decades after Region, Race, and Class in the Making of Colombia was first published,1 it continues being read in Colombian universities and various higher education institutions around the world. With a generosity for which I am grateful, professors—​many of whom I do not know—​use it to discuss the difficult moments of the nation’s foundation and the greater or lesser role played by its most humble people, especially blacks and mulattos, in the republic’s formation. Now, when I conceived a possible prologue for this new English language edition, it occurred to me that a couple of thoughts might be in order. In the 1980s, reflections on the fate of nations, their origin, and their nature gained strength. The theoretical assumptions with which we had formerly examined those topics started to be confronted by highly provocative and intellectually audacious essays, such as Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalisms. Beyond the territory, race, language, and religion as established realities, it was a matter of thinking of the nation as an “invention” or as the “imagined” product of a collectivity. On the other hand, the historians and political scientists of the subaltern school in India, supported by the writings of Antonio Gramsci and other theoretical tools, diverged from the old notion that nations were the result of the bourgeoisie’s historical project and, on the contrary, looked at the other protagonists ignored by history, their own interests, and their subaltern views. In the context of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent radical destruction of the Soviet Union, and with it of the socialist bloc in Eastern Europe, and the disintegration of nations like the former Yugoslavia, studying the origin and nature of nations became an urgent matter. Revisiting the independence movements that led to national formations in Latin America was inevitable, and in effect became the main example employed by Anderson to demonstrate the validity of his “imagined community” model. In this vein, good studies were published, but what was yet to be attempted was to demonstrate in detail how traditional nationalist discourses constructed a posteriori concealed

xii  Preface to the English language edition intense social and racial conflicts that were key motives on the ground for the uprisings and revolutionary wars for independence. It was thus necessary to write the history of the birth of the Colombian nation and its protagonists following a new script. To do so, I decided to examine one of the many conflicts—​the most important and decisive one—​that determined the fate of our war of Independence and the contents of the new nation: the one that confronted Santa Fe de Bogotá and Cartagena de Indias. This in turn led me to place at the center of my research that which we had not focused on up to that moment in historiography: the protagonism of Afro-​Cartagenans in the foundation of the nation and the first republic. Now I would like to discuss another no less interesting question: why republish it today? I believe that it will help students interested in Latin American history who do not read Spanish, but do read English, to understand a key aspect of the origins of the social struggles for democracy and citizenship that continue to determine today’s social life in Latin American nations. Rescuing from oblivion the powerful struggle of Afro-​descendants in the founding years of Latin American republics allows us to gain a more complete vision of how long and full of setbacks those struggles have been, and to understand that, no matter how terrible the defeats have been, humble people have always been, from the very beginning, protagonists in search of the still unattained ideal of achieving true democracies of citizens. Furthermore, it contributes to examining the history of the nascent republics, particularly of Colombia, in all its complexity and fragility: how difficult was the initial experiment of building a nation in an extremely fragmented geography immersed in regional tensions inherited from colonial times. I hope that reading this book will be a contribution in this respect. Nothing lasting can be written without emotion, and I have always written with great passion about Colombia. This book is no exception, and it is perfectly clear that I wrote it thus in order to tell a story that is as “objective” as possible about the tensions that accompanied the birth of the Colombian nation: the power struggles between the Andean and Caribbean regions, and the no less important struggle between Creoles and Afro-​descendants over the greater or lesser space for freedom and citizenship available to the latter. I attempted to narrate in this book the forgotten protagonism of Afro-​descendants in the struggle for a democracy of citizens. Moreover, I did so to the point of expressing my conviction that no other social group—​and certainly not the enlightened Creoles—​made such efforts in the nascent republic, from 1809 to 1815, to turn it into a social practice and not merely a vain rhetoric devoid of content. The reaction was not long in coming, and it was good for the book. I would dare say that in Colombia there was no History program and others in the Social Sciences and Law that did not use my text for better or for worse, some to praise it, and others to denigrate its interpretation. No less could have been expected. Region, Race, and Class in the Making of Colombia is the first book in Colombian

Preface to the English language edition  xiii historiography to examine in detail, as far as the sources permitted, the leading role of the popular sectors of Black and mulatto artisans in the movement for independence, whose actions were guided by their own interests and their own leaders, and, in addition—​and it is worth reflecting on this further—​to demonstrate that, from its very beginnings, the Independence movement was the result of a complex game of alliances of different social sectors, and not only of an elite. Moreover, I believe that, among its few merits, is also the fact that it attempted to understand the reasons that motivated them to take part in the movement: political, economic, social, and cultural reasons, as diverse as its participants. The patriotic nationalist motivations were a later invention that had little or nothing to do with the initial events of Independence. As I show in Chapter 6 of this book, the food crisis of 1808 and 1809 and the approval, in September 1811, of Article 22 of the Spanish Constitution of 1812, which denied Blacks and mulattos the right to citizenship, were more important for the people as factors in their mobilization and to define its content and the characteristics of their relationship with the elites. It is curious that Afro-​ Cartagenan peoples’ struggle for citizenship was received with such skepticism and that it is still so difficult to accept that the Black and mulatto artisans of 1811 fought in Cartagena de Indias for the right to be citizens, and that they did so in the modern sense of the expression. I often hear in conferences and seminars the opinions of those who appear to be emotionally unwilling to accept that popular sectors with little formal education could have attached such importance to the struggle for citizenship. I have come to believe that this attitude originates from at least three factors. The first one is related to a fascinating fact: even though thousands of pages have been written about heroic Cartagena, no one in the past was interested in researching its socio-​ racial composition during the transition from the colonial period to the Republic, much less the complex sociocultural world that made it so radically different from the Andes and so similar to the insular Caribbean in some fundamental aspects. It is impossible to understand anything of the history of Cartagena to this day if we do not take into account at least the following key aspects of its social formation: that it is a society whose formation was based on a slavery-​driven economy and relations, which remained in place in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. That as early as the seventeenth century, it already had a population of Black and mulatto artisans, and that in the second half of the eighteenth century, a community of them enjoyed a certain degree of recognition. That the vast majority of its inhabitants were and still are Afro-​Cartagenans, unlike what happens in other places, including the Colombian Caribbean itself. That, above all, its position as a Caribbean port with intimate, centuries-​long ties with the rest of the insular Caribbean endowed it with conditions of universality that the Andean cities only acquired well into the twentieth century. Together with commerce, European, North American, and Caribbean press and all kinds of books arrived as a matter of course.

xiv  Preface to the English language edition Second, such skepticism also stems from a lack of knowledge of Caribbean history. Anyone familiar with Caribbean historiography, especially Haitian historiography, knows that a central theme from its beginnings has been the struggle of Afro-​descendants for citizenship. It is quite likely that, with the circulation of news, which was very intense and rapid in the port of Cartagena, in the late eighteenth century its inhabitants were well aware of the great war unleashed not only for everyone’s freedom, but also for their status as citizens with full rights. Especially if, in addition, we take into account that Cartagenan authorities were quite fearful of the presence of the so-​called “French Blacks” who lived in their city’s slums. Today we know better than a few decades ago that, in Latin America, subaltern socio-​racial sectors often struggled for citizenship in an even more radical and enthusiastic manner than sectors of the elites, for the simple reason that it was more convenient to them. In the case of Cartagena, for example, being a citizen meant overturning the formal legal barriers that prevented Afro-​Cartagenans from gaining access to a higher status in society. For the elites, on the other hand, it meant the loss of some of their secular privileges. One last thing worth highlighting: two decades after its first publication, the trail opened by this book has followed a most stimulating and enriching trajectory: excellent texts have more deeply examined the protagonism of Afro sectors in those early years, with very valuable contributions. To mention only a few, I refer to the contributions to Colombian history by Marixa Lasso, Aline Helg, and James Sanders. They have contributed to shedding a brighter light on the roots of our modern history, so hidden from sight for so many years. Good wind and good seas for this new, English language edition of Region, Race, and Class in the Making of Colombia! Note 1 The book was published originally in 1998 under the title El fracaso de la nación: Región, clase y raza en el Caribe colombiano (1717–​1821), by Banco de la República and El Áncora Editores, Bogotá, Colombia. (T.N.)

Acknowledgments

The first version of this book was written in 1995 as a PhD dissertation in history at the University of Connecticut, United States. Convinced as I am that I would have never written it without the presence of my dissertation advisers, Hugh Hamill, Francisco Scarano, and Paul Goodwin, I owe them my first acknowledgments. Professor Hamill deserves more than gratitude. Only this distinguished professor knows how much time he spent answering my questions and correcting my manuscripts, and only I know how vital his intellectual and affective support was. Knowing Francisco Scarano has also been a veritable privilege. I owe an essential part of my education in the history of the Caribbean to him, and had it not been for the many hours he devoted to improving my writing, I would have never finished my Master’s thesis or my PhD dissertation. Finally, Professor Goodwin always provided me with substantial and valuable advice during the preparation of the manuscript. I must also acknowledge the support received from Professors William Hoglund and Karen Spalding, as well as my study colleagues Juan Casillas, Raul Calderón, Javier Figueroa, Kori Kapitke, and Javier Mathiew. The employees at the Archivo Histórico de Cartagena, in particular Moisés Álvarez, at the Archivo General de la Nación, Colombia, and the Archivo General de Indias, Spain, were extremely forthcoming, helping me find the materials on which this research is based. Robert Vrecenak and Lynn Sweet, of the loan department of the University of Connecticut Library, deserve my special thanks for their cooperation and patience. I cannot omit the financial support received from the Fulbright program, whose fellowship allowed me to conduct my Master’s studies in the United States, or the help provided by the Department of History and the Center for Latin American Studies of the University of Connecticut. Without them, my doctoral studies would have been impossible. Finally, my gratitude to the División de Fundaciones Culturales of the Banco de la República, without whose research fellowship it would have been much more difficult to conclude this book; to the University of Cartagena, which has given me its unconditional support over the

xvi  Acknowledgments years; and to my father, my most implacable critic, for his comments and everything else. Twenty-​five years after its first Spanish language edition, we present to the public this excellent translation into English, which is mainly the result of the intellectual generosity of Bernd Reiter, who devotes a significant part of his time to disseminating social science texts on Latin America and the Caribbean among English language readers. My sincere thanks to this extraordinary editor. I would also like to thank the Routledge publishing house for welcoming my book, and in particular Natalja Mortensen for her enthusiasm and coordination. To my translator, Alejandro Reyes, congratulations for his excellence in this difficult work. Finally, to Lucía, who is always there, thank you … for everything.

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Introduction

Immediately after the creation of the republic in Greater Colombia, a national history started to be elaborated. In 1827, José Manuel Restrepo published in Paris the first part of his six-​volume major work on the struggles for independence of the states of Venezuela, Ecuador, and New Granada. In it, he minutely reconstructed what he believed were the most important events of the war against Spain. Having in his possession documentation that would be envied by historians, and being an exceptional witness as a political leader, Restrepo did not limit himself to a mere description. On the contrary, in his Historia de la Revolución de la República de Colombia, he recorded the nation’s foundational myths. One hundred sixty-​one years later, some of them, perhaps the most substantial, continue to live.1 I believe that three of those myths in particular have been reiterated by generations of historians in one way or another, to the point that today they are accepted as undisputable and constitutive truths of the origins of our nationality. The first one, a point of departure in Restrepo’s work, argues that, at the time of Independence, New Granada was a political unit whose central authority governed the viceroyalty from Santa Fe. The second myth is the idea that the leading Creole elite of New Granada rose up on July 20, 1810, against the government of Spain, driven by the ideal of creating an independent nation. Unfortunately, the “genie of evil” introduced dissent between federalist and centralist Creoles, which led to the failure of the first independence, and the military stronghold and commercial port of Cartagena was the main culprit for that failure by giving rise to the division. The third myth argues that the independence of New Granada was the exclusive work of Creoles. Indigenous and Black people and the “castes” either sided with the empire or played a passive role under the command of the leading elite. In other words, they participated in the armies and died as ignorant as before. Only exceptionally is the outstanding participation of one or another mulatto or Mestizo recorded. Surprising as it may be, there is not a single version of Colombian history that contradicts these fictions created by Restrepo more than one and a half centuries ago. In 1912, Historia de Colombia, by Jesús Henao and Gerardo Arrubla,2 was published in Bogotá. This work became the basic text for teaching national DOI: 10.4324/9781003381198-1

2  Introduction history for several generations and the first one to be translated into English. In the sections on Independence, the authors merely reproduced Restrepo’s narrative almost word for word. In the first half of the twentieth century, there was a boom of studies on Independence. Hundreds of articles and books were published on the life of Creole heroes and the glory of their battles. The history of the struggles against Spain became the best ideological instrument in the efforts to legitimize the government of the elite3 until 1964, when the historian Indalecio Liévano Aguirre published his revisionist work, Los grandes conflictos sociales y económicos de nuestra historia. This work introduced nuances and variations on Restrepo’s interpretation, but no substantial changes. Liévano, of course, does not speak of the “genie of evil” but of the interests of New Granada’s leading elites. He did not refer to the people to brand them as stupid or ignorant, as Restrepo did, but he remained convinced that Indigenous and Black people and the “castes” did nothing more than support the good Creoles, such as Nariño, and reject the bad ones, the “oligarchs” of Cartagena.4 The so-​called New Colombian History of the 1960s and 1970s was too concerned with understanding the great social and economic processes and showed little interest in matters of politics and culture. There was no major discussion in this period regarding the formation of the nation, and almost no interest in the topic of Independence. The most important exception was perhaps Javier Ocampo López’s El proceso ideológico de la emancipación, where for the first time this author attempted to conduct a systematic study of the ideas that shaped the struggles of independence. For Ocampo, the nationalist ideology of the New Granadan elite set the tone for the struggles for independence.5 In the 1980s and 1990s, studies on the topic acquired a certain importance once again. In 1986, Germán Colmenares edited a book of essays on the economic and social impact of the wars of independence in Colombia’s southern region, beginning with an excellent analysis of the work of Manuel José Restrepo.6 A short time earlier, Zamira Díaz de Zuluaga had written about Independence and Popayán’s plantations, demonstrating the negative effect of those wars on the economic development of the rural areas of the province of Cauca.7 More recently, Margarita Garrido published a study on the expressions of political life in small localities during the period in question, where she attempts to demonstrate the existence of a proto-​national ruling elite.8 In spite of the novelty of the topics examined and their important contributions to our knowledge of that period, the works mentioned above leave intact the old national mythology developed by Colombian elites since the early nineteenth century. A number of works written by non-​ Colombian historians contributed to reinforcing the elitist view of the Independence and Colombia’s national origins. In 1973, John Lynch published his renowned work The Spanish-​American Revolutions, 1808–​1826, where we find various ideas that essentially reiterate

Introduction  3 Restrepo’s notions, which continue to dominate Colombian historiography. First, Lynch, like Restrepo, believes that the viceroyalty was constituted as a political entity with a central authority against which the Creoles rebelled, and for that reason he believes that the conflicts between Santa Fe and Cartagena arose spontaneously with the July 20 rebellion. It is interesting to observe that authors like Lynch, who define the viceroyalty as a collection of regions, are not in the least disinclined to discuss the phenomena surrounding Independence, as if New Granada were a single unit. Second, he claims that the struggle for the independence of New Granada originated in Santa Fe and was a consequence of the political interests of the Creole elite; and third, Lynch reproduces the old idea that Black, Indigenous, and mulatto peoples had a greater affinity to the Spanish than to the Creoles. In general, in contrast with his approach to Venezuela, Lynch does not highlight the people’s participation in his analysis of New Granada. He merely points out the people’s sympathy toward the imperial party.9 One year earlier, in 1972, Richard Graham had published a brief essay on Latin America’s independence. In that work, Graham is more explicit than Lynch, and argues, regarding the first independence of New Granada, The leaders of the movement had invariably been drawn from the upper classes of Colombia. Fortunately for them, social tensions had not yet surfaced. The elites, however, managed to undo their revolution all by themselves, and the Spanish forces had an easy time of it.10 Graham sees no social conflicts during the Independence, and, like Lynch, he believes that it was exclusively a matter of the elites, who were discontent with the Spanish government. In another well-​known essay, David Bushnell went further: If no outburst of social and racial conflict occurred to threaten the revolution in New Granada it was in large part because underlying tensions had not been brought to a head by a process of a rapid socio-​economic change as in late colonial Venezuela, and because the fitful nature of the independence struggle gave less room for popular participation.11 And Anthony McFarlane published in 1983 the article “Comerciantes y monopolio en la Nueva Granada: El consulado de Cartagena de Indias,” where, influenced by Restrepo’s and Antonio Nariño’s writings and limited at the time by his scarce knowledge of early nineteenth-​century Cartagenian society, he argued that one of the key factors for the origin of the independence movement was the clash between the progressive Creole elite of Santa Fe and the reactionary monopoly of the Spanish merchants of Cartagena.12 In 1993, his latest book, Colombia before Independence, was published in English, where he reinforces the same argument, albeit somewhat nuanced. This latest work does

4  Introduction not hesitate to describe New Granada as a conglomerate of regions isolated from each other; nonetheless, when discussing the economic and political crisis of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it does so from the perspective of an inexistent protonational elite.13 In 1994, the work of German author Hans-​Joachim König, En el camino hacia la nación, started to circulate in Spanish. It is perhaps the first book that attempts to examine extensively the topic of the influence of nationalism in the formation of the Colombian state and nation. König’s research led him to conclude correctly that the nation’s founding fathers failed in their attempt to create the nation. Nonetheless, his analysis of the origins of Independence faithfully reproduces the myths established by Restrepo.14 In the following pages, I intend to demonstrate the inaccuracy of such theses and to argue that the construction of the nation failed because New Granada never existed as a political unit. That when the independence movement began, there was no Creole elite with a national project, but a number of regional elites with different projects. Last, that the subaltern classes played a decisive role with their own projects and interests, since the beginning of the war of independence. During the first independence of Cartagena (1811–​1815), Blacks and mulattos played a leading role. While conducting the research and writing the results, I benefited from a series of works that have been—​some more than others—​essential in the process of clarifying my own view of the facts. First, I would like to mention those of Jorge I. Domínguez, Brian Hammett, and John Tutino.15 They have demonstrated that, contrary to what other scholars had argued before them, the beginnings of the political revolution of the Spanish colonies in 1808 were not the product of the work of a national ideology, but of specific regional circumstances that led to a myriad of conflicts among the regional elites and between them and Spain. The works of James Scott and Steve Stern on the capacity of popular sectors to resist domination drove me to seek documentation on the silenced role of Black and mulatto people in Cartagena during the Independence.16 Later works provided me with the instruments necessary to inquire into the decisive role of the popular masses at the beginning of the ill-​fated revolution. For example, in 1992, Peter Guardino and Charles Walker wrote a brilliant essay on the relations between the state, society, and politics in the period of the breakup with Spain, where they argued that “social scientists should not replicate the inability of early republican elites to acknowledge that members of the popular classes were able to develop a conception of their own interests and act accordingly.”17 Moreover, in Peasant and Nation: The Making of Post-​Colonial Mexico and Peru, a splendid book I had the opportunity of reading when I was beginning to write my last chapter on the role of Blacks and mulattos at the beginning of the republic, Florencia Mallon illustrates this essential thesis: “In the making of nation-​states, the discursive, intellectual, military, and political struggles of the Latin American peoples, rural or otherwise, were central to defining both

Introduction  5 success and failure.”18 Almost at the same time as Peasant and Nation came to light, Aline Helg published her book Our Right to Equal Share: The Afro-​Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–​1912, where she shows how dramatic and bloody was the failure of Black and mulatto Cubans in their attempt to redefine the Cuban nation at the beginning of the twentieth century.19 Mallon and Helg demonstrate that the process of imagining the nation is multiple and extends through time, in addition to being the result of intense conflicts in which subaltern groups participated with their own discourses, small victories, and great failures. Thus, both historians were able to overcome the limitations of Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community.” The works of Mallon and Helg have enriched the theory of nation building in postcolonial societies. On the other hand, in the particular case of India, Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey studied the participation and failure of popular sectors in the task of building the nation.20 The book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, by Benedict Anderson, continues to be an indispensable point of departure for discussions of the process of formation of Latin American nations. However, his thesis must be discussed if we want to gain a better understanding of the experience of New Granada. In the chapter titled “Creole Pioneers,” Anderson seems to propose that American nations were formed in the early nineteenth century as the result of being imagined by the Creoles. According to him, the experience of Creole bureaucrats was decisive in the formation of an American consciousness. The press, in turn, was an instrument in the consolidation of a sense of community. Anderson overlooks the participation of the popular masses in the formation process of continental nations, and in this point, one can clearly perceive John Lynch’s and Gerhard Masur’s influence on him.21 I do not intend to discuss in detail the problems of the formation of the Colombian nation or to provide a complete narrative of the events of New Granada’s Independence. Rather, my intention is to demonstrate that Restrepo’s foundational myths were just that: myths inscribed in Colombian consciousness. To that end, I chose as the work’s central axis the analysis of one of the most important political conflicts during the period of Independence: the conflict between its two main cities, the Caribbean port of Cartagena de Indias and the viceroyalty’s Andean capital, Santa Fe de Bogotá. When discussing the intervention of the popular sectors in the independence movement, I am fully aware that I depended on sources that are not ideal. However, I must say that, unfortunately, they are the only ones available at the moment. After the reconquest of Cartagena by the Spanish in 1815, one of the actions of the winning army was to burn an immense number of documents of that period. The lack of interest by professional bureaucrats, the climate, and a termite plague destroyed almost all the remaining manuscripts. By the end of the nineteenth century, the historians Manuel Ezequiel Corrales and José Urueta had collected and published most documents from the Independence period stored in

6  Introduction the archives of Cartagena and Santa Fe de Bogotá. Despite having been mostly selected to glorify the Creole elite, many of the documents thus preserved contain very useful information on the people’s activities. However, there is very little information on the popular leaders Pedro Romero and Pedro Medrano, especially the latter. Not even a detailed physical description of them has been found. We know almost nothing about Medrano, other than the vague images created by Creole contemporaries and traditional twentieth-​century history. Only fragments scattered in documents and official histories about Romero, his wife, his children, and his leadership survive. The same is the case with the enslaved from Cartagena. Very few details about their participation in the struggle for independence can be reconstructed, other than the constant references to the Creole leaders and their threatening presence. However, by employing the Creoles’ own testimonies, by putting together the various fragments rescued from oblivion, and by reading these fragmentary texts between the lines, it was possible to reconstruct a landscape that reveals the importance of mulattos and free Black people in the events of Independence.22 This is so much so that one could argue that racial dynamics as a factor in the analysis of political struggles at the end of the Colony is essential to understand its characteristics and results. Of course, many questions remain unanswered. Finding the answers would entail a patient search in the archives and a historian’s imagination freed from an excessive servitude to footnotes. I organized the research findings as follows. In Chapter 1, I discuss the problem of central authority in the colonial period, showing how geography, the abysmal state of communication routes, the kingdom’s poverty, and especially a long tradition of regional autonomy precluded the exercise of a central authority in New Granada. In Chapter 2, I develop a narrative of the demographic and social characteristics of the Colombian Caribbean, especially regarding the issue of authority and social control in a frontier region like this one. I considered this necessary because Colombian historiography in many ways reflects the prevalence of the Andean world and the concomitant marginalization of the Caribbean coast. Only recently have there been studies focusing on Caribbean provinces in the colonial period. I am particularly interested in documenting the extreme frailty of the control held by the elites over the population and the frontier life that prevailed in most of its territory, in contrast with the existence of an important urban center such as Cartagena de Indias. One of my objectives is to illustrate the distance between the social world of the Colombian Caribbean and the more structured hierarchy of the Eastern Andes. In Chapter 3, I analyze the profound economic, social, and political transformations experienced by the city of Cartagena de Indias in the second half of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth century. I demonstrate the emergence of new social forces, the Americanization of the city’s elite, and, in particular, the consolidation of a new class of free Black and mulatto artisans. Likewise,

Introduction  7 I found it important to illustrate the feeling of crisis that predisposed Cartagenans to challenge viceregal power and search for radical solutions. In Chapter 4, I examine the factors that made the economic and social conflict between Cartagena and Santa Fe de Bogotá inevitable in the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century; and in Chapter 5, I elaborate how the Cartagenan elite’s struggle for political autonomy in the first decade of the nineteenth century was the consequence of the aggravation of the conflict with the Santa Fe elite. In addition, I discuss the thesis that the latter was unable to create a nation-​state during the first independence because it had neither the hegemony nor the strength to impose itself over the powerful regional elites, such as those from Cartagena. In the sixth and last chapter, I examine in detail the political life of the independent republic of Cartagena between 1810 and 1815. My interest there is to demonstrate that, in order to evaluate what happened in the city in those years, it is absolutely necessary to take into account those social forces other than the Spanish Creoles that participated in determining its fate. At least according to the current documentation available, I can assert that mulattos and free Black people played a central role during the first republic. On the other hand, Cartagena’s defeat at the hands of the reconquering Spanish army in 1815 had lasting effects for Colombia’s political history. After that date, Cartagena disappeared as a center of power in the Caribbean, and the future Republic of Colombia was finally able to organize itself as an Andean republic. Furthermore, the city’s destruction in 1815 implied a violent interruption of the consolidation of a very important social development process that had taken shape in the last years of the Colony: the formation of stalwart sectors of Creole merchants and mulatto and Black artisans. Only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would Cartagena have something similar. Some final observations seem pertinent. The name “New Granada” is used here to refer to the territory of present-​day Colombia. For practical effects, the Quito Audiencia had complete autonomy to manage its own affairs. Regarding the racial terms Black (negro), mulatto (mulato), Pardo, and Zambo, I use them the same way they were employed in Cartagena during the Colony. For example, a Black person was considered inferior, subject to severe legal, social, and cultural limitations as a result of having African ancestors on both family sides. Mulatos or Pardos were those with European and African ancestors, recognizable by their skin color. A Zambo was the product of a mixture of African and Indigenous ancestors. In both cases, the mixture with Black or Indigenous ancestry implied a discriminatory social and ideological characterization against the subject who had such ancestry, also expressed in different types of exclusions. In actual fact, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, those terms were a simplification of the variety of racial denominations employed in colonial Cartagena. In his most recent work, Peter Wade includes a very useful discussion of the meaning of the concepts “race” and “ethnicity.” At some point, he observes:

8  Introduction to identify oneself or others as “black” in much of the Western world is to invoke […] a long history of colonial encounters, slavery, discrimination, resistance, and so on. This does not mean that ethnic histories cannot be long and conflictive, but I think it is necessary to highlight the history or race by calling it by its name.23 Regarding the term “subaltern,” I use it in the same sense as that employed by Ranajit Guha in the preface to Selected Subaltern Studies, that is, as “the general attribute of subordination, whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender, or in any other way.”24 In its political connotation, it refers to the great masses, that is, to those who do not belong to the elites, to the groups that hold political power. Throughout this book, the subalterns are associated with a racial condition. A good part of the Black and mulatto people who confront the Cartagena elite and proclaim absolute independence is composed of artisans who suffer, independently of their greater or lesser degree of respectability, the effects of racially discriminatory social and cultural patterns, typical of the colonial order in which they live. It is very important to know that, in private and public documentation regarding Cartagena during the period of Independence, the elites almost always name individuals belonging to the people according to their skin color. Hence, they are often called negros, mulatos, and zambos as a precise way of recognizing them. Finally, a brief comment on the use of the concept of “region.” I employ the term according to the tradition founded by Luis Ospina Vásquez to make sense of modern studies on Colombian history. In my opinion, his classification of the national territory according to large strips of land is the only viable way to study not only the nation’s phenomena but also the colonial formation itself. For Ospina, the regions are at first the product of a geography that establishes natural divisions, later reinforced by economic and sociocultural circumstances.25 According to Eric Van Young, “we should be looking at market relations if we want to understand the nature of geo-​historical regions.”26 According to the classification proposed by this author to study regional typologies in colonial and postcolonial Mexico, Cartagena de Indias, as the center of a vast region of the Colombian Caribbean, shares features of the so-​called funnel and pressure cooker/​solar regions. It can be identified with the former due to its condition as an export center of gold, almost the only export product of New Granada—​with the peculiarity that this commodity was not produced in its hinterland. It can be identified with the latter because very early on it was the center of attraction for regional production in an area poorly articulated and relatively autonomous of the local markets. I must clarify that my interest in this book is not to reflect on the economic nature of New Granada’s regions. The concept of region interests me in its political/​cultural dimension. In other words, the main aspect I want to highlight here is how, as the economic conflict between Cartagena and Santa Fe—​the two most

Introduction  9 powerful cities and centers of regional power of the viceroyalty—​took shape toward the end of the Colony, an early form, embryonic if you like, of regionalist consciousness, understood in the terms proposed by Van Young, developed. These first expressions are found, among other places, in the famed writings of Francisco José de Caldas about the influence of climate and geography on organized beings and in José Ignacio de Pombo’s response to the speculations of the scientist from Popayán regarding the superiority of the Andean man relative to coastal people.27 Notes 1 José Manuel Restrepo, Historia de la revolución de la República de Colombia, 8 vols. (repr., Bogotá: Talleres gráficos, 3rd edition, 1942–​1950). 2 Jesús M. Henao and Gerardo Arrubla, Historia de Colombia (Botogá, 1912). 3 Of the first forty books published in the series Biblioteca de Historia Nacional, at least thirty refer to the period of Independence. The Academia de Historia de Colombia launched the series in 1902. 4 Indalecio Liévano Aguirre, Grandes conflictos sociales y económicos de nuestra historia (Bogotá: Tercer Mundo, 1964). 5 Javier Ocampo López, El proceso ideológico de la emancipación (Tunja: Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica de Colombia, 1971). 6 Germán Colmenares (comp.), La independencia: ensayos de historia social (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Cultural, 1986). 7 Zamira Díaz de Zuluaga, Guerra y economía en las haciendas. Popayán, 1780–​1830 (Bogotá: Talleres Gráficos del Banco Popular, 1983). 8 Margarita Garrido, Reclamos y representaciones. Variaciones sobre la política en el Nuevo Reino de Granada. 1770–​1815 (Bogotá: Banco de la República, 1993), pp. 365, 370. 9 John Lynch, The Spanish-​ American Revolutions, 1808–​ 1826 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1973), 227–​265. 10 Richard Graham. Independence in Latin America: A Comparative Approach (New York: McGraw-​Hill, 2nd edition, 1994). 11 David Bushnell, “The Independence of Spanish South America,” in The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 3, ed. Leslie Bethel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 114. 12 Anthony McFarlane, “Comerciantes y monopolio en la Nueva Granada: El consulado de Cartagena de Indias,” Anuario colombiano de historia social y de la cultura, vol. 2 (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional, 1983), pp. 43–​70. 13 Anthony McFarlane, Colombia before Independence: Economy, society and politics under Bourbon rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 178–​184, 324–​346. (The Spanish version of this work was recently published by Banco de la República and El Áncora Editores, with the title Colombia antes de la Independencia. Economía, sociedad y política bajo el dominio borbón). 14 Hans-​Joachim König, En el camino hacia la nación. Nacionalismo en el proceso de formación del Estado y de la nación de la Nueva Granada, 1750–​1856 (Bogotá: Banco de la República, 1994).

10  Introduction 15 Jorge I. Domínguez, Insurrection or Loyalty. The Breakdown of the Spanish American Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Brian Hammett, Roots of Insurgency. Mexican Regions, 1750–​1824 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); John Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico. Social Bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750–​1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). 16 James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Steve Stern, Peru’s Indian People and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest. Huamanga to 1640 (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1982) and “New Approaches to the Study of Peasant Rebellion and Consciousness: Implications of the Andean Experience,” in Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18th to 20th Centuries, ed. Steve Stern (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 3–​25. 17 Peter Guardino and Charles Walker, “The State, Society, and Politics in Peru and Mexico in the Late Colonial and Early Republican Periods,” Latin American Perspectives, 19, no. 2 (1992): 38. 18 Florencia E. Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 330. 19 Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-​Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–​1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). 20 Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: United Nations University, 1986); Gyanendra Pandey, “Peasant Revolt and Indian Nationalism,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 233–​ 287. Throughout this book, I have employed the terms “subaltern” and “elite” in the same way they have been used by the Indian group of scholars responsible for the publication of Subaltern Studies: Studies in South Asian History and Society. See especially Ranajit Guha, “Preface” and “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, 35–​44. For a critical approach to the work of the Subaltern Studies group, see, among others, Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in Subaltern Studies IV, ed. Guha, 364–​376; Gyan Prakash, “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism,” American Historical Review, 99, no. 5 (Dec. 1994), 1475–​1490; and Florencia E. Mallon, “The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies: Perspectives from Latin American History,” American Historical Review, 99, no. 5 (Dec. 1994), 1491–​1515. 21 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 47–​ 65. Gerhard Masur, Simón Bolívar (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1948). 22 To examine in detail two excellent examples of readings of fragmentary records on colonialism, see Spivak, “The Rani of Simur: An Essay in Reading the Archives,” History and Theory, 24, no. 3 (1985), 247–​272; and Ann Stoler, “In Cold Blood: Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narratives,” Representations, 37 (1992), 151–​189. For a brilliant and very influential methodological exercise, see Guha, “The Prose of Counter-​Insurgency,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, 45–​86. 23 Peter Wade, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (London: Pluto Press, 1997), 21. 24 Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (ed.), Selected Subaltern Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

Introduction  11 25 Luis Ospina Vásquez, Industria y protección en Colombia, 1810–​1930 (Bogotá: Editorial Santa Fe, 1955). 26 Eric Van Young, “Haciendo historia regional: consideraciones metodológicas y teóricas” in Pedro Pérez Herrero (comp.), Región e historia en México (1700–​1850) (Métodos de análisis regional, México: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 1991), p. 110. 27 Eric Van Young, “Haciendo historia regional: consideraciones metodológicas y teóricas,” and Carol A. Smith, “Sistemas económicos regionales: modelos geográficos y problemas socioeconómicos combinados,” in Pedro Pérez Herrero (comp.), Región e Historia en México (1700–​1850), pp. 37–​99. See also, among others, Germán Colmenares, “La nación y la historia regional en los países andinos, 1870–​1930,” (paper read at the colloquium sponsored by the Program on Latin American Studies of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C., April 21, 1982) and “Región-​nación: problemas de poblamiento en la época colonial,” in Revista de extensión cultural n. 27–​28 (Medellín: Universidad Nacional, 1991), pp. 6–​15; Renán Silva (ed.), Territorios regiones, sociedades (Bogotá: Universidad del Valle-​Cerec, 1994). See letter by José Ignacio de Pombo in Hernández Alba, Guillermo (ed.), Archivo epistolar del sabio naturalista José Celestino Mutis vol. 4 (Bogotá, 1985); see also, Caldas, “Estado de la geografía del Virreinato de Santa Fe de Bogotá, con relación a la economía y al comercio,” and “El influjo del clima sobre los seres organizados,” in Francisco José de Caldas, Semanario del Nuevo Reino de Granada, 3 vols. (Bogotá, 1942), vol. I, pp. 15–​54 and 136–​196.

1 New Granada and the problem of central authority

I The political-​administrative organization of the territories encompassed by the Viceroyalty of New Granada, firmly established in 1739, constituted an extreme case of weakness of a central authority, a lack of internal cohesion, and regional fragmentation throughout the colonial period. When the empire’s final crisis broke out, the viceroyalty was a political entity still being consolidated. Its formation was relatively recent and not devoid of serious obstacles, which greatly hindered its stability. Studying this key aspect of its history is essential to understand the nature of the events that took place in New Granada as a consequence of the empire’s political crisis in the early nineteenth century. From the mid-​sixteenth century to 1739, the immense territory that as of the latter date constituted the new Viceroyalty of New Granada was under Peru’s jurisdiction. This was merely a formality, a way for the Crown to solve the problem of administering territories that, because of their poverty, were not suitable to constitute a separate viceroyalty. In order to exercise authority, which could not be done from Lima due to the great distances and the terrible state of communication routes, Spain established a complex system of government that had as its main axes the presidencies of Santa Fe and Quito, the Royal Audiencias of New Granada, Quito and Panama, subjected to the viceroy of Peru, and the governors-​ captain generals in the most important provinces, who depended on the Royal Audiencias.1 In practice, the aforementioned presidencies and Audiencias operated with complete autonomy from the viceroy of Peru, and they communicated directly with the king and the Crown’s central organs. Something similar, albeit to a lesser extent, occurred within the Audiencias. The governors-​captain generals of the provinces managed their affairs with an independence that often disregarded the authority of the oidores (judges of the Royal Audiencias), resolving issues directly with the metropolis instead. Naturally, in the everyday life of the colonies, it was impossible to exert, from Madrid, some sort of real control over those officials. DOI: 10.4324/9781003381198-2

New Granada and the problem of central authority  13 This complex system, which seemed to reflect the realities of Spain’s colonial dominion in America better than any, and which successfully provided political stability, symbolized in the colonies’ submission, also fostered a culture whose main feature was a permanent conflict between the various administrative bodies and a relative anarchy in decision-​making: the acceptance of the king’s authority was mediated by a complex and ambiguous system of jurisdiction and political traditions that turned local officials into authorities who denied any other type of power established above them in American territory.2 In 1734, the general intendant Bartolomé Tienda de Cuervo understood the essence of New Granada’s internal politics better than anyone did: “each governor in his district,” he said, “whether the jurisdiction is big or small, being appointed Captain General, is absolute and acknowledges no superior to correct his errors.”3 Francisco Silvestre, prosecutor of the Royal Audiencia of Santa Fe, referring to the conflicts between the various authorities prior to the creation of the viceroyalty, clearly reiterated, “Each governor was a Captain General in his province and considered himself independent.”4 Probably, nowhere else in Spanish America did anarchy express itself in a more extreme manner than in the territory of present-​day Colombia. The proven impossibility of exercising any sort of control from Lima over these vast territories and the growing conflicts between the presidents and the Audiencias of Quito and Santa Fe, and between these and the governors of the provinces, were one of the main reasons for the decision to separate the Audiencias of Quito, Santa Fe, and Panamá from the jurisdiction of Peru, and to create with them a new viceroyalty.5 This was in accordance with one of the main objectives of the new Bourbon policy, which was precisely to endow its American colonies with mechanisms of power and administration that allowed greater efficiency in the administration of their profits and their economic productivity.6 II The first attempt at establishing the Viceroyalty of New Granada in 1717 and its quick suppression in 1723 constitute a clear example of the insurmountable difficulties faced by Spanish officials in their attempt to impose a central authority on those territories. The main reason given by Madrid to dissolve the viceroyalty only six years after its creation was its high cost relative to the generalized poverty of the region. Everything seems to indicate, however, that the first Viceroyalty of New Granada was suppressed mainly because the viceroy found it impossible to exercise his authority over the provincial governors, especially the governor of Cartagena. According to the report presented to the king by the general intendant Bartolomé Tienda de Cuervo in 1734, the governors of the coastal provinces did not accept the new viceroy’s authority, and with their actions led his government to failure.7 When the Viceroyalty of New Granada was reestablished in 1739, the city of Santa Fe de Bogotá was chosen as the seat of its government. The Audiencia

14  New Granada and the problem of central authority of Panama moved from the jurisdiction of Lima to that of New Granada. For practical effects, Quito maintained its autonomy, just as it had maintained it during the two last centuries under the dominion of Peru, so that the authority of New Granada’s viceroys was circumscribed from the beginning to the limits of the homonymous Audiencia.8 However, natural and historical factors made the exercise of power beyond the Andean provinces extremely difficult. The other provinces—​Cartagena, Popayán, and Antioquia—​naturally tended to operate as autonomous entities, often in conflict with the authority of the viceroy and the Audiencia. Beyond the notions expressed in an administrative order, the regions’ relative isolation and autonomy, together with the inefficiency of the central authorities, was perhaps the most notorious characteristic of colonial organization in New Granada. In its configuration, geography played an essential role together with other aspects. The geographical space of New Granada not only greatly influenced the initial establishment of incipient urban centers, but also conditioned the nature of the changes and the development of the types of societies established in its different regions. Two-​thirds of New Granada’s difficult topography was made up of the extensive Amazon jungle and the eastern plains, which were very difficult to access with the means available to colonial society, as well as scarcely populated and devoid of precious metals. The other third, west of the Andes, mostly dominated by the three ranges that composed its mountain system, was home to the first Indigenous cultures, dispersed from south to north in the highlands of the cordilleras and in the great valleys between the mountains where large rivers flowed, especially the Magdalena and Cauca Rivers. In their search for gold and silver, as well as a labor force to work in the mines, the river alluvions, and the land to produce food, the Spanish founded cities and towns in the heart of the cordilleras, the depth of tropical valleys, and the Caribbean coast, often at enormous distances from each other and separated by unsurmountable mountain barriers. In a slow process of colonization that in many ways was spontaneous, small groups of men, facing a strong opposition from Indigenous people in some of its large areas and constrained by the lack of advanced technology and colossal geographical obstacles, created, in more than two centuries, stable settlements where an intense mixture of races and a diversity of occupations resulted in clear social distinctions among regions relatively isolated from each other.9 Four of these large regions were home to more than 90 percent of New Granada’s population in the final days of the Colony, divided into two large, clearly distinct systems: the one dominated by the Andes, which extends from its southern entrance in the province of Popayán, and the coastal system, with the Caribbean to the north and the Pacific to the west.10 The abrupt differences created by the division of the Andes into three cordilleras naturally led to the establishment of relatively self-​sufficient regions.

New Granada and the problem of central authority  15 The presence of peaceful Indigenous settlements where a labor force was easily obtained, the existence of bountiful precious metals, the benign climate, and the fertility of the soil for agriculture were the factors that, individually or together, led the regions that were most isolated from the developed Atlantic world, that is, the Andean mountain zones, to have the largest number of Spanish residents and the largest population in general. Three of the four large regions where most of the population settled were in the Andes. The first and most important one, in whose center was the ancient Chibcha country, extended down the Eastern Cordillera. Toward the end of the colonial period, it comprised the provinces of Santa Fe and Tunja, as well as those of Girón, Neiva, and Pamplona. The region stood out for being the most densely populated in New Granada, for its almost complete lack of minerals, for its strong textile production employing a domestic manual system, and for its abundant and varied agriculture. Its many towns located at various altitudes, from the peaks to the tropical valleys of the cordillera, allowed growing products as varied as wheat and potato, cotton and sugarcane. Santa Fe de Bogotá was the most important city in the eastern region. As the seat of the Royal Audiencia and later the viceroyalty, it was home to the main government bodies. With more than 20,000 inhabitants, it was the largest urban center in New Granada. Most of its population was made up of Indigenous and Mestizo people. But the largest White population also lived there. In addition to housing the largest number of bureaucrats, Santa Fe was the residence of one of the most powerful groups of merchants and plantation owners in the viceroyalty, which allowed them to control most of the interregional commerce of the Andean provinces.11 Second in importance was Tunja, the center of the most densely populated province in New Granada. Although in the second half of the eighteenth century it experienced a sort of decadence, it remained the center of a rich agricultural production, especially wheat and potato. To the north of Bogotá were the towns of Vélez, Socorro, and Pamplona. Vélez was an important commercial city with a mild climate, in whose zone of influence sugarcane, tobacco, and cotton were grown. El Socorro stood out for its large textile production and for being one of the most prosperous towns toward the end of the colonial period. Pamplona, located in cold lands in the extreme north of the cordillera, functioned as a political and administrative center of a vast agricultural area in the valleys of Cúcuta, which produced cocoa and sugar.12 This eastern strip had two main characteristics. First, it was the most populated in New Granada—​at least 60 percent of the total population recorded in the 1778–​1780 census—​and was the only densely populated region in the colony. Second, since pre-​Hispanic times, the Eastern Cordillera constituted a “great transit zone, part of an immense roadway” that united the north with the south of America, which meant that communication was relatively easier between its different points, compared to other zones of the viceroyalty.13

16  New Granada and the problem of central authority The second great region, whose center was south of the Eastern Cordillera, comprised the mild-​weathered plateau of Popayán, the tropical valley of Cauca, the warm valley of Patía, and the cold lands of Pasto. Isolated to the south of the eastern strip by rough and barely inhabited lands that were almost impossible to traverse, and in all its extension by the unbridgeable wall of the Central Cordillera, this region was home to the important cities of Popayán and Cali. The former was the region’s administrative and economic center. With large cattle-​ranching latifundia and medium-​sized cocoa and sugarcane plantations, it had a strong control over very important mining zones in the eighteenth century, located in the province of Chocó. Popayán, together with Cartagena, had one of the viceroyalty’s most powerful slave societies.14 On the other hand, Cali acquired great importance in the early sixteenth century due to the intense commerce with Panama and Guayaquil through the port of Buenaventura, and in the eighteenth century, by becoming the social and economic center for large slaveholding plantation owners of the Cauca valley.15 The region’s administrative situation was quite complex and ambiguous until the end of the Colony. Formally, it belonged to the Audiencia of Quito, but part of its territory was controlled by the Audiencia of Santa Fe and, in aspects as important as the fiscal control of mining, was the object of constant conflicts between the two Audiencias.16 The last of these great Andean regions, dominated by the mountains of the Central and Western Cordilleras, housed the province of Antioquia. Its inhabitable lands were divided into a series of valleys separate from each other by high mountains. By the late eighteenth century, its most important towns had developed on its mild-​weathered plateaus: Santa Fe de Antioquia, Medellín, Río Negro, and Santa Rosa de Osos. Based on its progress exploiting gold and a relatively intense commerce, it developed an agricultural activity that, differently from that of the Coast and Popayán, was not dominated by the presence of large plantations with an enslaved or semi-​enslaved labor force. In Antioquia, in addition to plantations, small-​ and medium-​scale production enjoyed significant growth. The extreme isolation of its territory entailed a very slow population growth until the late eighteenth century and a remarkable tendency to close itself within a relatively self-​sufficient society.17 North of Antioquia, and separated from it by a vast and abrupt jungle, was the Caribbean region, almost all of it composed of the coastal flatlands. The final stretch of the Magdalena River divided it into two large provinces: Cartagena and Santa Marta. A large and sparsely populated region, it had a poorly organized institutional life, a dispersed population, limited urban development, and a relatively informal economy. In contrast, it had the most important sea ports, Cartagena and Santa Marta, as well as Mompox de Loba, one of the most active commercial centers and a meeting point between the Caribbean and the interior, which gave its residents, especially those of the ports, particular features that

New Granada and the problem of central authority  17 distinguished them from those of the rest of the country: a clear vocation to cultivate relations with the outside world and a more cosmopolitan vision. Legal and illegal commerce became its main activity, in addition to being an important region for the export of cattle and agricultural products, especially in the eighteenth century. The intense trade of enslaved people through its coasts and the resulting development of large properties with an enslaved labor force contributed to defining its image as a slaveholding society, where all things Black became an essential element of its personality, but, differently from the eastern strip, which functioned since time immemorial as a large transit area, the Caribbean interior, abundant in jungles, swamps, and marshes, was difficult to traverse until well into the colonial period.18 As we mentioned above, in addition to these four large regions where most of the population was concentrated, two-​thirds of the territory of New Granada were composed of the eastern plains and the Amazonian jungles. In the former, the Spanish established the province of Los Llanos during the Colony. The colonizers’ penetration, however, did not reach the Amazonian jungles, which continued to be inhabited by relatively dispersed groups of Indigenous peoples until well into the republic. In the eastern plains, colonization focused on the territories of Casanare and Arauca, and to a much lesser extent on San Martín. Nature’s obstacles and the presence of Indigenous tribes determined to defend their territory made it impossible to penetrate massively into this vast area, although it must be noted that, in spite of its very reduced demographic density, in the plains of Casanare and Arauca there was a prosperous agricultural and cattle-​raising economy in the late eighteenth century, undertaken by religious orders, especially the Jesuits. In addition, regular trade was established with Boyacá and Santa Fe, all of which led to the establishment of small Spanish and Mestizo settlements.19 Finally, the Pacific coast, located on the viceroyalty’s western seashore, was home to the province of Chocó. Its importance resided exclusively in gold production, which became the most important of New Granada in the second half of the eighteenth century. The rigors of its equatorial climate discouraged population growth as well as the development of economic activities such as agriculture and trade. In addition, being a frontier and mining zone, it was subjected to a series of limitations imposed by the Crown, such as the ban on commercial sailing through Atrato. Its scarce population was almost entirely made up of Black and Indigenous people. Even though it was rich in gold, no important towns developed in Chocó in colonial times.20 III At the same time as geography exerted a preponderant influence on the conformation of New Granada as a habitat divided into relatively isolated areas, economic and social factors characterized the regions according to racial

18  New Granada and the problem of central authority distinctions, turning them into distinct cultural geographies. The anthropologist Peter Wade has called this process the “regionalization of race in Colombia.”21 There has been a consensus in Colombian historiography regarding the notion that, by 1770, New Granada was quite different from the Andean societies of Quito and Peru due to the dynamic growth of the Mestizo population and the scant presence of the Indigenous element. This unanimity has led to the indiscriminate and unquestioning use of the only general population census available from the viceroyalty, conducted between 1778 and 1780. According to that census, the Indigenous population accounted for no more than 20 percent of the total population, while the “free population of all colors” was around 46 percent.22 The abundance of an Indigenous labor force in the eastern region, its relative absence in the Caribbean coast, the need for an enslaved labor force for the mines of the Pacific and Antioquia, the demographic catastrophe of the native population, the migration patterns of Spaniards, the climate’s influence and the communication difficulties, the cultural understandings at the time regarding Indigenous and Black labor, and the fact that Cartagena was the main trading post of enslaved people in Spain’s colonies in the sixteenth and the seventeenth century were all key elements that conditioned the way the miscegenation process occurred in the various regions. While on the Caribbean and Pacific coasts the Black element played a decisive role in the development of the Mestizo population, the Black population itself remained substantial. In the eastern Andean region, Indigenous-​White miscegenation, together with the presence of many Indigenous settlements, defined its personality. In Antioquia, even though there was a large number of enslaved people, the preponderance of the White population significantly reduced the influence of the Black element. In the process of constructing images of themselves, even though on the Caribbean and Pacific coasts there was a relatively large Indigenous population, the coastal lands identified themselves as Black and mulatto in contrast with the Andean interior. IV The regional patterns of settlement of Black and Indigenous workers and Spanish colonists, as well as the images that developed of each of the regions, took root over time due to the relative lack of communication, which limited people’s mobility to a relatively small radius. In late eighteenth-​century New Granada, the means of communication were highly rudimentary and little had changed since the early days of the Conquest. Generally, Spaniards and later the Creole society continued to use the roads and rivers employed by the natives. As in the past, the means of land transportation were still mules and the men themselves; water transportation was done with canoes and champanes. Few improvements and innovations worthy of mention took place during the Colony. Perhaps the most important one, which was to connect Cartagena to the Magdalena River, was the construction of the Canal del Dique. However, it

New Granada and the problem of central authority  19 remained closed longer than the time it actually served the commerce of people and goods.23 Differently from other colonies in America, almost no bridges were built, and the small advances made using wheel carts did not lead to their generalized adoption as a means of interregional transportation until well into the republic. Actually, most of the important roads in the Andean region hardly allowed mule transportation.24 In a territory where nature dramatically imposes itself on its inhabitants, the quick extinction of the Indigenous population and the slow and very meager growth of the Creole society resulted in the disappearance of the communication routes built by the natives in entire zones, which were taken over by the jungle. Two examples suffice to illustrate this point: in areas such as the rich valley of Sinú on the Caribbean plains, a system of canals built by the Zenú Indians, a remarkable work of hydraulic engineering that allowed the cultivation of hundreds of thousands of hectares in a great context of ecological balance, was completely lost with the collapse of the civilization that had made them thrive; instead, the Spanish inherited a vast area of land subject to floods and impassable most of the year.25 On the other hand, the jungles that, during the Colony, separated the Caribbean from the interior do not seem to have existed in the same way as they did in pre-​Hispanic times.26 Nothing contributed more to establish the feelings of regional autonomy and to hinder the exercise of a central authority in New Granada than the immense difficulties involved in communicating with Santa Fe de Bogotá from any important point of the other regions of the viceroyalty. Built in the heart of the eastern Andes, in a vast savanna surrounded by mountains at an altitude of 2,600 meters (8,500 ft.) above sea level, the seat of the viceroy and the Royal Audiencia was 1,154 kilometers away from Cartagena, the viceroyalty’s seaport and stronghold and the only legally established point of contact with the outside world. More important than the distance traveled were the precarious conditions of the voyage. Judging by the narratives of officials and travelers, the trip from the Caribbean coast to the Andes was a veritable nightmare.27 Government officials or merchants who arrived at Cartagena from Europe after crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a relatively peaceful voyage that took shortly over one month, or those who came from Cuba or Jamaica on a trip that took less than a week, had to face the odyssey of climbing up to the Andes. Ideally, the trip lasted forty days, but it was very common to take much longer due to the many obstacles and difficulties encountered. The traveler had to go through three extremely painful stages, and if the traveler were a merchant taking many goods with him, he would soon learn of the innumerable risks that would threaten his fortune. The first stage involved reaching the river port of Mompox, in the south of the province of Cartagena. The easiest route was to navigate the Canal del Dique to Barranca, and from there by land to Mompox, but since the canal was rarely available, it was necessary to sail in the open sea to Bocas de Ceniza, near Barranquilla, and continue down the river to Mompox. Under normal

20  New Granada and the problem of central authority conditions, that is, if there were no problems reaching Bocas de Ceniza, this first stage lasted around fourteen days. Once in Mompox, the traveler had to go up the river against the current to the port of Honda, in the interior. Under ideal conditions, this stage lasted twenty-​two days; however, anything could happen on the way: during the winter, the river could become unpassable due to the increased currents, which meant that the traveler was obliged to be patient and wait in Cartagena or Mompox for the rains to ease; or in contrast, a prolonged drought could reduce the flow, making the voyage a slow operation lasting many days, with the oarsmen literally pulling the vessel from the shores. It was also relatively common for the oarsmen to abandon the champán or canoe in the middle of the trip, and then it was necessary to wait in whatever riverside village they could find while new workers were hired. Finally, but no less important, the traveler suffered terrible discomforts: the ruthless attack of clouds of mosquitoes, stings from all sorts of insects, and serpent bites. When he finally reached Honda and sighed in relief for having overcome the hardships of the climate and the river voyage, he faced an almost vertical climb up the Andes to reach the savannas of Santa Fe. Even though the trip was only sixty kilometers, it often took up to six days, where the traveler’s fright could reach unimaginable levels, riding on muleback on the edge of endless cliffs. Communication between the seat of the viceroys and Popayán and Antioquia was also extremely precarious. In a chronicle of his visit to the province of Antioquia in 1775, the visitor Francisco Silvestre narrates his profound horror traveling through the narrow mountain trails. The trip from Santa Fe to Medellín could last months, depending on the rains and the state of the roads and the rivers.28 No less frightful were the roads of Quindío and Guanacos that connected the capital to Popayán. The former was described by the Baron of Humboldt, who traversed it in 1801: The Quindío mountain is considered the most difficult mountain pass of the Andean Cordillera. It is a completely uninhabited dense forest that in the most favorable season can only be traversed in ten or twelve days. There is not a single hut or any means of subsistence: at all times of year, the travelers take supplies for one month, but it often happens that, due to the deicing and the sudden increase in currents, they remain isolated, unable to go down to Cartago or Ibagué. The highest point of the road, La Garita del Páramo, is at an altitude of 3,500 meters above sea level.29 Regarding the latter, another distinguished French traveler wrote: In Santa Fe, I heard a terrifying description of Guanacos; but they did not exaggerate. When I traveled through Socorro, I thought I had seen the worst roads, but that was nothing: the ones here did not resemble the frightful rocks of Guacha, but the difficulties encountered were no less awful.30

New Granada and the problem of central authority  21 The difficult voyage from Santa Fe to Popayán took at least twenty days. On the other hand, transporting goods from Cartagena to Popayán could take ninety days, and to Medellín, fifty-​two, in the best of circumstances.31 V With a territory fragmented by nature and provinces isolated by the terrible state of the communication routes, the efforts of the enlightened viceroys to impose their authority on New Granada and to establish a central authority to foster greater progress also clashed with the absolute lack of tax revenues due to the miserable state of the viceroyalty’s economy. In 1729, in his report to the king, the president of the Audiencia of New Granada referred to his arrival in the New Kingdom as follows: “I found it, sir, in a most ruinous state: the main residents and nobles are no longer there, commercial establishments are almost inactive, the republic’s trades are idle, and everyone is crestfallen and in a pitiful state of poverty.”32 Similar comments, highlighting the backwardness of New Granada, are found in almost all of the viceroys’ Relaciones de Mando in the eighteenth century. Everything seems to indicate that the main characteristic of this vast area of the Spanish empire was that it was one of the most backward. Ten years after President Manso wrote such a melancholy description, the Crown attempted to solve the issue of authority in those territories by establishing them as a viceroyalty. By doing so, the officials in Madrid intended to overcome New Granada’s pitiful underdevelopment and to put an end to the outrageous contraband taking place in its Caribbean coasts, thus increasing its revenues and the security against foreign threats in South America. Illegal commerce was one of the key factors that defined the Crown’s policies toward the new viceroyalty. Madrid considered it the main cause of the two main negative characteristics of New Granada: its permanent lack of economic resources and the weakness of its defenses.33 In the second half of the eighteenth century, Bourbon policies emphasized the need to implement fiscal and economic reforms in its American colonies to gain greater control over the empire, to strengthen the metropolis’s economy, and to pay with the profits from American colonies the costly military reforms needed to confront the growing threats from England.34 However, in New Granada, the reform was a failure. It was unsuccessful in putting an end to or even reducing contraband, nor did it significantly increase the volume of legal trade. Between 1782 and 1796, legal exports from New Granada to Spain were the smallest of the empire, only 3.2 percent of the total of American exports to Spain,35 and this in spite of the enormous territory of the viceroyalty, encompassing more than one million square kilometers, and its population of more than one million inhabitants. The Bourbon reforms also failed to strengthen internal production, whose taxes were intended to cover military expenses. On the contrary, even in the late eighteenth century, New Granada was still unable to sustain itself

22  New Granada and the problem of central authority financially and continued receiving a stipend of 100,000 pesos from New Spain to pay for Cartagena’s coastguard fleet. Even though it was one of the largest gold-​producing areas in the world, its impact on the royal finances of New Granada was not significant.36 In 1776, the viceroy Guirior complained that the gold extracted had to be immediately sent to the coast to pay for the goods imported from Europe.37 Although at the end of the century, the export of agricultural products increased somewhat—​especially cotton, cocoa, leather, quinine, and palo brasilete—​overseas legal commerce was overwhelmingly dominated by gold. In 1804, José Ignacio de Pombo observed that gold represented 85 percent of New Granada’s export trade.38 However, tax revenues from gold production were insignificant, in spite of the many efforts to control the metal’s clandestine trade, which led to the virtual closure of all roads and rivers that facilitated communications with the outside world.39 The royal monopolies of spirits and tobacco were the most important sources of viceregal income in the second half of the eighteenth century. Between 1767 and 1777, revenues from spirits and tobacco represented half of total revenues. Nonetheless, and in spite of the efforts to regulate it, the annual product from the royal monopolies was less than 300,000 pesos, and the Crown’s total income did not reach 800,000 pesos, which is the clearest evidence of the viceroyalty’s poverty.40 The small volume of overseas trade of New Granada was intimately related to its meager productive development and the precariousness of its communication routes. In the context of such economic poverty and the predominance of a monopolistic policy, the reformist viceroys exhibited a tendency, derived from the physiocratic ideas of the time, to strengthen agriculture in the interior to foster progress in the country. In 1776, the viceroy Guirior pointed to the predominance of unproductive latifundia and the growing transfer of land into idle hands as key factors for rural misery. Guirior even proposed to the Crown to undertake a radical agrarian reform that would distribute unproductive latifundia to landless peasants. He believed that such measures could stimulate agriculture and decrease the country’s terrible misery, but nothing worked.41 New Granada’s proverbial poverty was such in the early nineteenth century that the enlightened José Ignacio de Pombo bitterly compared its situation with that of the small Caribbean islands as follows: While Santo Domingo, with only 300,000 inhabitants, exported 40 million pesos per year, Cuba, with 400,000 inhabitants, exported 7 million, and Jamaica, with 200,000, exported 8 million; New Granada, with a much larger territory than the three islands together and with more than twice the population, had a legal foreign trade equaling slightly over 3 million pesos.42 The work of the colonial state in New Granada was therefore as insignificant as the amount of its income. A careful reading of the reports of the viceroys from 1739 to 1810 is impressive for their almost complete lack of reference to material

New Granada and the problem of central authority  23 development works. The little money that remained after paying the bureaucracy and the most indispensable expenses was reserved for defense works and other military expenses incurred by the important military stronghold of Cartagena.43 In the late eighteenth century, the Creole society and the central government were at an impasse, aggravated by the empire’s profound crisis. The more the latter became involved in European wars, the less capacity it had to sustain the monopolistic regime imposed on the economy of its colonies, and New Granada seemed to be mired in illegality in the context of suffocating restrictions of all sorts established by a central authority with no means to enforce them. Contraband and smugglers flourished throughout the entire kingdom: while they were more abundant and open on the Caribbean coast, they were also present in the west, the east, and the south, that is, in the four corners of New Granada. VI In the realm of culture, the lack of economic strength reinforced the old habits of the Conquest, especially the particularities of the cities. The colonization of Colombian territory was everything but planned in its execution. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the conquest of new territories was undertaken by war captains who, from the urban centers already established, organized expeditions in search of the coveted gold, thus expanding their frontiers. In this process of appropriation of the territory by the conquerors, the jurisdictions emerged more as a practical undertaking than as a product of reason and the law,44 and usually the center of these jurisdictions was a city. But that city had a more important function than serving as the seat of government bodies; it was, above all, a symbol of power, in particular of that exerted over the rest of the province or the region. Hence its preeminence and the zeal with which it was defended. The kingdom’s misery and the languor of its trade strengthened the power of these regional or provincial capitals. The immense obstacles for interchange between the regions and the lack of an economy to stimulate it meant that the inhabitants of the region were born, lived, and died without ever leaving it, and therefore their only concrete reference of power was the great city established in front of them. It thus became the object of their deepest loyalties and the image of their identity. This is of the utmost importance because, as we will see when we examine in detail the formation of the Caribbean region, it is the only explanation for the fact that regions characterized by a great diversity were unified according to the image of its most important urban center. Precisely due to the origin of these cities’ power, whose ultimate source was force, when other urban centers acquired certain importance, they almost naturally tended to conquer their own autonomy and to organize their own space of power. Regrettably, as in the entire viceroyalty, the cities’ accumulation of resources remained quite mediocre, so none of them ostensibly and definitively surpassed the others. It was thus since the arrival of the Spanish, and nothing

24  New Granada and the problem of central authority had changed substantially in New Granada by the end of the colonial period. Since the late sixteenth century, Cartagena and Popayán had started to demand official recognition of their autonomies before Santa Fe; in the Caribbean region, Cartagena quickly imposed itself on Santa Marta, which the latter never forgave, and in the eighteenth century, Mompox attempted to sever its dependence on Cartagena. In the south, Cali began seeking its autonomy from Popayán, while Buga did likewise from Cali. In Antioquia, Medellín imposed itself over Santa Fe de Antioquia, and in the eastern region, Tunja always defended its autonomy, while prosperous towns in the late eighteenth century, such as Socorro, also struggled for their autonomy from Santa Fe de Bogotá. On the eve of the independence movements, the regional fragmentation of New Granada, which the Bourbons’ centralizing project was unable to mend, continued to be, due to its nature and history, the main characteristic of its social organization and the determining factor of its culture. Notes 1 A detailed description of the Royal Audiencia of New Granada prior to the creation of the viceroyalty can be found in Academia Colombiana de Historia, Historia extensa de Colombia, vol. III, ts. 1–​4 (Bogotá: Ediciones Lerner, 1965–​1967). 2 For a more detailed discussion of this aspect, see John L. Phelan, “Authority and Flexibility in the Spanish Imperial Bureaucracy,” Administrative Science Quarterly, V (June 1960), pp. 48–​65; and Frank Jay Moreno, “The Spanish Colonial System: A Functional Approach,” Western Political Quarterly (June 1967), pp. 308–​320. 3 “Memorias del Intendente Don Bartolomé Tienda de Cuervo sobre el estado de Nueva Granada y conveniencia de restablecer el Virreinato, 1734,” in El Nuevo Reino de Granada en el siglo XVIII, ed. Jerónimo Becker and José María Rivas Groot (Madrid, 1921), p. 208. 4 Francisco Silvestre, “Apuntes reservados particulares y generales del estado actual del Virreinato de Santa Fe de Bogotá, 1789,” in Relaciones e informes de los gobernantes de la Nueva Granada, comp. Germán Colmenares, vol. II (Bogotá: Ediciones Banco Popular, 1989), pp. 37–​38. 5 Francisco Silvestre, prosecutor of the Royal Audiencia, considered that the establishment of a strong central authority was the main reason for creating the Viceroyalty of New Granada. Ibid., p. 38. In addition, the royal decree of 1717, which created the new viceroyalty, referred explicitly to the need for a central authority to put an end to regional conflicts. See “Real Cédula de 1717,” in Becker and Rivas Groot, El Nuevo Reino de Granada, pp. 200–​201. 6 An excellent synthesis of Bourbon colonial policies toward America are found in John Lynch, Bourbon Spain, 1700–​1808 (London: Oxford, 1989), pp. 329–​374. 7 “Memorias del Intendente,” pp. 203–​230. See also, María Teresa Garrido Conde, La primera creación del Virreinato de la Nueva Granada, 1717–​1723 (Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos, 1865), pp. 95–​102; Juan Marchena Fernández, La institución militar en Cartagena de Indias en el siglo XVIII (Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos, 1982), pp. 216–​220.

New Granada and the problem of central authority  25 8 The royal decree of 1717 attempted to subordinate Quito to Santa Fe and Panama to Lima, to no avail. That decree determined that the Audiencias of Quito and Panama were to be abolished. See “Real Cédula,” in Becker and Rivas Groot, El Nuevo Reino de Granada, p. 201. 9 On the colonization of New Granada, see Germán Colmenares, Historia económica y social de Colombia, 1537–​1719, vol. I (Bogotá: Editorial La Carreta, 1973), pp. 1–​20. 10 For an analysis of Colombia as a country divided into regions, see Luis Ospina Vásquez, Industria y protección en Colombia, 1810–​ 1930 (Bogotá: Editorial Santa Fe, 1955), pp. 1–​32; Jaime Jaramillo Uribe, Ensayos de historia social, vol. II (Bogotá Tercer Mundo Ediciones, 1989), pp. 59–​90; and Anthony McFarlane, Colombia before Independence: Economy, Society and Politics under Bourbon Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 31–​70. 11 There is still no major study on Santa Fe de Bogotá and its role as the capital of New Granada. Brief descriptions in this regard of the colonial city and the province of Santa Fe are found in Silvestre, “Apuntes reservados,” pp. 55–​64; Ospina Vásquez, Industria y protección, pp. 1–​23; Jaramillo Uribe, Ensayos de historia social, vol. II, pp. 81–​84. A more complete study on Santa Fe’s colonial eighteenth-​century society appears in Julián Vargas Lesmes, La sociedad de Santa Fe colonial (Bogotá: Cinep, 1990). On the province of Santa Fe, the best work is still Juan Villamarín, “Encomenderos and Indians of the Colonial Society in the Sabana de Bogotá. 1537–​1740” (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 1973). 12 Silvestre, “Apuntes reservados,” pp. 92–​ 95. See also Germán Colmenares, La provincia de Tunja en el Nuevo Reino de Granada. Ensayo de historia social, 1539–​ 1800 (Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, 1970). 13 Ospina Vásquez, Industria y protección, pp. 28–​29. 14 Regarding the role of Popayán as the center of the southern Andean region, see Germán Colmenares, Historia económica y social de Colombia, vol. II: Popayán, una sociedad esclavista, 1680–​1800 (Bogotá, 1979); Peter Marzahl, Town in the Empire: Government, Politics, and Society in Seventeenth-​Century Popayán (Austin: University of Texas, 1978); Zamira Díaz López, Oro, sociedad y economía. El sistema colonial en la gobernación de Popayán, 1533–​1733 (Bogotá: Banco de la República, 1994). 15 Colmenares, Historia económica, vol. I, p. 278. By the same author, see also Cali, terratenientes, mineros y comerciantes, siglo XVIII (Bogotá: Banco Popular, 1983). 16 Marzahl, Town in the Empire, p. 9; Colmenares, Historia económica, vol. I, p. 253. 17 The best study on the economy and society of Antioquia in the eighteenth century is found in Ann Twinam, Miners, Merchants and Farmers in Colonial Colombia (Austin: University of Texas, 1982). 18 In spite of its methodological problems and the inconsistency of some of its theses, the most complete study on the Colombian Caribbean coast is Orlando Fals Borda, Historia doble de la Costa, 4 vols. (Bogotá: Carlos Valencia Editores, 1980–​1986). 19 Jane Rausch, A Tropical Frontier: The Llanos of Colombia. 1531–​ 1831 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984). 20 Two excellent books have been written on colonial Chocó. See William F. Sharp, Slavery on the Spanish Frontier: The Colombian Choco, 1680–​1810 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976), and Robert C. West, Colonial Placer Mining in Colombia (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1952).

26  New Granada and the problem of central authority 21 Peter Wade, Blackness and Race Mixture: The Dynamics of Racial Identity in Colombia (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 51–​59. 22 McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, p. 34. 23 On the colonial means of transportation and the Canal del Dique, see Nicolás del Castillo Mathieu, La llave de las Indias (Bogotá: Ediciones El Tiempo, 1981), p. 43. 24 There is an extensive literature on nineteenth-​century Colombian roads, written by government officials and travelers at the time. See, for example, Joaquín Fidalgo, “Expedición Fidalgo,” in Colección de documentos inéditos sobre la geografía y la historia de Colombia, ed. Antonio Cuervo, vol. I (Bogotá, 1891); Augusto Le Moyne, Viajes y estancias en América del sur, la Nueva Granada, Santiago de Cuba, Jamaica y el Istmo de Panamá, 1828 (Bogotá, 1945); Gustavo Mollien, Viaje por la República de Colombia en 1823 (Bogotá, 1944). See also Silvestre, Apuntes reservados, p. 47. 25 Clemencia Plazas, La Sociedad Hidráulica Zenú (Bogotá: Banco de la República, 1993), pp. 9–​28. 26 Ospina Vásquez, Industria y protección en Colombia, p. 25. 27 The best descriptions of the voyage between Cartagena and Santa Fe de Bogotá are found in the diaries of officials and travelers who traveled on that route in the first decades of the nineteenth century. See Expedición Fidalgo, pp. 81–​83; Le Moyne, Viajes y estancias, pp. 43–​112 and 349–​355; Mollien, Viaje por la República de Colombia, pp. 25–​58. For a recent historical description, see Castillo Mathieu, La llave de las Indias, pp. 45–​47. 28 Twinam, Miners, Merchants and Farmers, p. 83; Le Moyne, Viajes y estancias, p. 92. 29 Ibid., p. 207. 30 Mollien, Viaje por la República de Colombia, p. 207. 31 Colmenares, Historia económica, vol. I, p. 252; Marzahl, “Creoles and Government,” p. 8; Twinam, Miners, Merchants and Farmers, pp. 84–​85. 32 Antonio Manso, “Relación hecha por el Mariscal de Campo, D. Antonio Manso, como presidente de la Audiencia del Nuevo Reino de Granada, sobre su estado y necesidades en el año de 1729,” in Colmenares, Relaciones e informes de los gobernantes, vol. I, p. 27. 33 Pedro Mendinueta, “Expediente sobre contrabando, 1794,” AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 960. 34 J. H. Parry, El imperio español de ultramar (Madrid: Ediciones Aguilar, 1970), p. 298. Regarding the Caroline economic reforms in New Granada, see Miklos Pogonyi, “The Search for Trade and Profit in Bourbon Colombia, 1767–​1777” (PhD diss., University of New Mexico, 1978); and McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, pp. 99–​184. Regarding military reforms, see Allan J. Kuethe, Military Reform and Society in New Granada, 1773–​1808 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1978). 35 John Fisher, Commercial Relations between Spain and Spanish America in the Era of Free Trade, 1778–​1796 (Liverpool: Center for Latin American Studies, University of Liverpool, 1985), p. 77. 36 According to Abel Cruz Santos, New Granada contributed significantly to the world gold production during the Colony: 17.21 percent in the sixteenth century, 39.01 percent in the seventeenth century, and 24.69 percent in the eighteenth century. In Abel Cruz Santos, “Economía y hacienda pública,” in Historia extensa de Colombia, vol. XV (Bogotá: Ed. Lerner, 1965), p. 141. 37 See “Relación del estado del Nuevo Reino de Granada que hace el excelentísimo Sr. D. Manuel de Guirior, 1776,” in Colmenares, Relaciones e informes, vol. I, p. 319.

New Granada and the problem of central authority  27 38 José I. de Pombo, “Informe del Consulado de Cartagena sobre contrabando en el Virreinato de la Nueva Granada, 1804,” AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 960. On overseas trade in New Granada, see also Ospina Vásquez, Industria y protección, pp. 62–​63. 39 Pogonyi, “The Search for Trade,” pp. 217–​221. 40 Ibid., pp. 154–​200. According to Pogonyi, the monopoly of spirits accounted for about one third of viceregal income in that period. Regarding the first decade of the nineteenth century, see Ospina Vásquez, Industria y protección, p. 63. 41 See “Relación del estado del Nuevo Reino de Granada que hace el excelentísimo Sr. D. Manuel de Guirior, 1776,” in Colmenares, Relaciones e informes, vol. I, pp. 298–​299. 42 José I. de Pombo, “Informe sobre contrabando, 1807,” AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 961. 43 As we shall see in detail in Chapter 3, Cartagena consumed most of the economic surplus produced by the provincial royal treasuries in New Granada. See Pogonyi, “The Search for Trade,” pp. 140–​148. 44 See Colmenares, Historia económica, vol. I, pp. 16–​19.

2 The Colombian Caribbean Authority and social control in a frontier region

I In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Caribbean provinces of New Granada constituted a different cultural and social universe from that established in the Andes. In effect, one could argue that the process of turning the coastal regions and their people into the “other” was an essential part of the construction of an Andean identity as the “I” who best represented an imagined Colombian nation.1 A number of the most renowned writings of this period deal with the issue. The essays by Francisco José de Caldas and Pedro Fermín de Vargas, two of the most important intellectuals of the Andean colonial elite, portrayed the coasts as distant places, not only physically but also culturally.2 In Caldas’s works, for example, the coastal provinces of New Granada, with their fiery plains and their “savage” and “undisciplined” Black and mulatto inhabitants, symbolize a lack of progress and the impossibility to achieve it. In contrast, the Andes seem to have been ideally created to produce morally and intellectually superior individuals.3 A few years earlier, in the context of the harsh dispute with Cartagena’s Consulado de Comercio4 in 1796, Santa Fe merchants did not hesitate to refer to Cartagena as a place located on the kingdom’s margins or frontiers.5 The Andean center created the image of a frontier-​Caribbean devoid of any form of regulated social order.6 That image was the faithful reflection of a central characteristic of the coastal provinces on the eve of Independence: the elite’s extremely weak control over subaltern groups. This weakness expressed itself at two levels: first, in the failure of the Santa Fe elite to impose a central authority over the coastal provinces; and second, in the inability of the Caribbean elites to control most of the inhabitants of the coast. II At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Colombian Caribbean encompassed, in its three large provinces of Cartagena de Indias, Santa Marta, DOI: 10.4324/9781003381198-3

The Colombian Caribbean  29 and Riohacha, an approximate extension of 150,000 square kilometers (58,000 mi2). Its coasts extended over 1,600 kilometers (994 mi) from the Gulf of Urabá to the Guajira Peninsula.7 Inland of its territory were the rich valleys of the Sinú, San Jorge, Cesar, and Cauca Rivers and the Magdalena Plains, as well as the vast savanna north of the former province of Cartagena and the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. The latter constituted an apparently independent orographic system separate from the Andes, which curiously, in the midst of the Caribbean lowlands, rose up to reach the highest altitudes of New Granada (5,775 m or 19,000 ft) with the peaks of Simón Bolívar and Cristóbal Colón. The severe decline of the native inhabitants, its scarce population, the dispersion of its small settlements, and its many jungles, swamps and marshes made the Colombian Caribbean a habitat with extremely difficult inland communications. Joaquín Fidalgo’s priceless study on the geography of New Granada’s coasts, conducted between 1790 and 1805, demonstrates the extent to which contact among Caribbean peoples was mired in obstacles. Referring to communications between Riohacha and Santa Marta, two of the most important cities and province capitals of the area, he says: The road from the city of Remedios or Río de la Hacha, which goes from the coast and its surroundings to the city of Santa Marta, has two terrible stages […] It is unbelievable that communication between contiguous province capitals should be in such a state, but it is absolutely true, and the cause for that state of affairs escapes us, for none is sufficient to justify such neglect. It should be noted, however, that there is another road; but, in addition to being much longer, one must cross the Sierra traversing precipices and dense forests; since it is little used, and with the lush vegetation resulting from its climate, the trails are immediately taken over by the undergrowth; to which we must add the risk of tigers, leopards, serpents, and even the Chimila Indians.8 Until the mid-​eighteenth century, when the viceroyalty’s authorities began a systematic process of colonization of the territories inland from the Caribbean coast, most of those territories were in one way or another controlled by native peoples in open resistance against Spanish subjection expeditions. In the province of Santa Marta, the Chimila Indians had waged a war against the Spanish since the early days of the Conquest in the sixteenth century. Father Julián referred to the Chimilas as “the Moors of Algiers and Tunisia in the Mediterranean: cruel and treacherous corsairs.”9 The city of Santa Marta was the point of entry into New Granada, and the colonization of its hinterland was characterized by a ruthless struggle between Spaniards and Indians. Some peoples were subjected, but others, such as the Chimilas, fled to the interior of the province and remained there in a state of war. In 1778, its population, estimated at 10,000, started to be exterminated.10 By then, Santa Marta, the first city and archdiocese established in

30  The Colombian Caribbean Tierra Firme, had lost all importance and was in a state of utter ruin and almost entirely uninhabited, as a consequence of Indigenous resistance and constant pirate attacks.11 Almost the entire territory of the province of Riohacha was in the free kingdom of the indomitable Guajiro Indians. With the exception of two or three small Spanish settlements that were never able to grow or prosper significantly, everything else was controlled by the natives. The Guajiros turned the peninsula into one of Spanish America’s most intense and universal areas of contraband. They controlled a good part of the illegal trade with the Danish, English, French, and Dutch. In the late eighteenth century, its population was estimated at 30,000 inhabitants, of which at least 10,000 were armed. Not only did all military expeditions organized by the Spanish against them fail, but also all of those organized—​many of them with much worse intentions—​by republican Creoles, until the late nineteenth century, when they were finally subdued with blood and fire.12 Creole societies grew faster in the province of Cartagena than in those of Santa Marta and Riohacha, stimulated by the discovery of gold along the Sinú River and the scarce resistance by important organized Indigenous groups. However, to the west of Cartagena, beyond the Tolú lands, toward the fabulous kingdom of Darién, was an immense territory inhabited solely by Cuna Indians. As late as 1791, Colonel Fidalgo noted that from the Sinú River in the province of Cartagena de Indias to Portobelo in the province of Panamá, there is no Spanish settlement whatsoever on the coast, nor any inhabitants other than a few Cuna Indian villages from the gulf of Darién to that of San Blas de las Indias Mulatas.13 The western coast of the province of Cartagena constituted another uncontrollable frontier where contraband goods from European powers circulated with the support of rebellious Indians. In the late seventeenth century, the Scots had established a great colony named Caledonia on the coast of Darién, with the enthusiastic support of the British Crown. They built fortresses and established armies through an agreement with the Cuna Indians against their common enemy: the Spanish. In 1699, Juan Díaz Pimienta, governor of Cartagena and captain general of the coastal provinces, managed to expel the Scots but was unable to rule over the natives, and in 1785, almost one century later, during the viceroyalty of archbishop Caballero y Góngora, an extremely costly expedition was organized to subdue them, which was a complete failure.14 Thus, until the Colony’s final crisis, the Colombian Caribbean remained mostly a frontier territory, impervious to exploitation by Creole societies and to Spain’s “civilizing” advances. On the other hand, much of the little territory colonized was settled spontaneously, without the intervention of Spanish authorities, by marginal groups of runaway Blacks, fugitive soldiers, and adventurer

The Colombian Caribbean  31 mulattos and Mestizos who continued to live in distant places away from the reach of civil and religious authorities until well into the eighteenth century.15 III In order to subject this group of marginal people to the Crown’s institutional control and gain lands under Indigenous control in the mid-​eighteenth century, one of the most significant developments of that century took place: the foundation and refoundation of towns and the displacement of the frontier zones many leagues inland. This process was a direct consequence of the new Bourbon fiscal and centralization policies, on the one hand, and the expansion of cattle ranches, on the other. From 1744 to 1788, at least four expeditions to found towns in the Caribbean coast were organized by the colonial state, with some degree of success. The first one was organized in the province of Santa Marta by the maestre de campo José Fernando de Mier y Guerra and lasted twenty-​six years, from 1744 to 1770; the second took place in Tierradentro, organized by Francisco Pérez de Vargas in 1745; the third was led by lieutenant colonel Antonio de la Torre y Miranda in the savannas of the province of Cartagena and lasted five years, from 1774 to 1779; and the last and perhaps most spectacular expedition was organized in the territories of San Jorge, Nechí, and Cauca by a strange and fascinating character, the Franciscan priest Joseph Palacios de la Vega, in 1787 and 1788.16 Thanks to these systematic colonization campaigns, thousands of Indigenous people saw their subsistence lands turned into towns, cattle fields, and commercial roads. For some historians, the expeditions against Indigenous people were a result of the pressure for land exerted by the Mestizo population. In actual fact, there was no such demand for land to colonize; on the contrary, in order to found new towns in the province of Santa Marta, José Fernando de Mier had to take groups of people almost forcefully from the province of Cartagena. In addition, convicts from Santa Fe were required to found the town of San Sebastián in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. Father Julián narrates how those people were led in chains and how they escaped as soon as they arrived at their destination. In 1778, the province of Santa Marta had less than 40,000 inhabitants. In 1793, its population was still under 60,000. By the end of 1815, the city council requested, as payment for its loyalty to the king, among other things, to receive colonies of residents from the Canary Islands to populate the province. More than the pressure exerted by Mestizos, the expeditions against the native population were motivated by the desire of an influential group of Creoles to expand their haciendas by expelling Indigenous people from key areas.17 The results of gathering the experiences lived by these founders of towns in the fields, swamps, and waterways of the Colombian Caribbean, even if limited to those provided by statistics, are astounding and of profound consequence to our understanding of our history. According to what we know, these four

32  The Colombian Caribbean expeditions allowed the grouping and regrouping of more than sixty towns and almost 60,000 inhabitants from all castes: White, Indigenous, Black, Mestizo, Zambo, and mulatto. Only Antonio de la Torre founded thirty-​three towns, refounded eleven, and allowed the incorporation into civilian life of at least 40,000 Spaniards, Mestizos, Blacks, and mulattos.18 If to the 60,000 inhabitants mentioned above we add the 30,000 Guajiro Indians; the thousands of Chimilas, Cunas, and other minor tribes; and the runaway slaves from the maroon communities established in the territory, the population in 1770 must have totaled more than 200,000 inhabitants, more than 50 percent of whom remained dispersed, still without the West’s God and its law hanging over their heads or recently integrated into institutional life.19 All of this without counting the thousands of people who remained untouched by Spanish power. The existence of arrochelados,20 maroon communities, and rebellious Indians was not merely a marginal aspect of Caribbean social life in the eighteenth century. On the contrary, such marginality was a central and defining characteristic of the way those societies were constituted. According to the 1778–​1780 census—​the only remaining general census of the entire Colony—​the population of the Colombian Caribbean coast was 162,272 inhabitants, and its ethnic distribution was as follows: 11.57 percent White, 17.60 percent Indian, 62.12 percent free people of all colors, and 8.67 percent enslaved people. Employing these numbers as the sole instrument to describe the number and characteristics of the inhabitants of the Colombian Caribbean coast in the late eighteenth century conceals essential aspects of the region’s social life. For example, if we add the populations not counted, we have a population that is at least 30 percent greater than that reported in the census, and the Indigenous population occupies a much more important place than that established by the general census.21 IV Although the province of Cartagena was the second most populated in New Granada after that of Tunja, the Colombian Caribbean in general, as the rest of the viceroyalty, had a very low population density of fewer than two inhabitants per square kilometer. The population of the provinces of Santa Marta and Riohacha, including rebellious Indians, was barely over 100,000 inhabitants, while that of Cartagena was 150,000. The meager growth of the Creole societies of Santa Marta and Riohacha was in large part determined by the natives’ resistance. Since early in the Spanish colonization, important urban centers emerged in the region; however, as late as the late eighteenth century, it was a world where rural activities prevailed. Less than 15 percent of the population lived in Cartagena, Mompox, Barranquilla, Santa Marta, and Ocaña, cities devoted to commerce, while more than 85 percent lived in municipalities, towns, ranches, villages, and rochelas directly engaged in rural trades.22 We should not overlook the fact that in Cartagena, a most important port, there was a significant number

The Colombian Caribbean  33 of peasants and tenant farmers; however, even though it was the most populated of its urban centers, it had fewer than 15,000 inhabitants.23 In contrast with the insular Caribbean, in the Colombian Caribbean, there was no need to import a large labor force to supply the needs of a plantation system, even though it was in a geographically privileged situation and there was sufficient capital to invest in the purchase of enslaved Black people. Strictly speaking, such a system never existed. Even though Cartagena was a very large market of enslaved people, was located on the Caribbean coast, had a hinterland with plenty of forests and adequate lands for sugarcane production, and had one of the most powerful groups of landowners and merchants in New Granada, with broad commercial and financial connections with the outside world, we do not know of a single documented case of a production unit with the structural requirements of a plantation such as those of the Caribbean islands. Even though we still know very little about the seventeenth century in this regard, we at least have expressions of discontent by entrepreneurs who pointed to political reasons. As late as 1775, Francisco Fernández de Moure, one of the most influential Cartagenan merchants, continued to complain that the merchants from Cadiz did not accept anything other than gold and silver from New Granada traders as payment for Spanish goods, establishing in practice a prohibition on Cartagena to export tropical fruits to the metropolis. Eleven years later, when it decided to promote an agro-​export economy in the rest of its Caribbean possessions, the Crown was in perfect agreement with this policy of disincentive of the local production in New Granada.24 Was this merely the result of high-​handedness on the part of some Madrid officials? That does not seem to be the case. In actual fact, what at first stimulated the growth of Cartagena de Indias later became an essential obstacle for its progress and that of the rest of the coastal area: its vocation as a strategic stronghold and a key center in the trade of enslaved people. Cartagena was the entry point to the gold and silver kingdoms in the Andes, as well as the center of an intense trade of products with a vast area under Spanish domination in the Americas. This geographic and military condition hung like a sword of Damocles over the fate of the Colombian Caribbean. In the late eighteenth century, free maritime trade was forbidden in Cartagena and Santa Marta, while it was encouraged in Havana and Caracas. However, there is an important additional reason: the outrageous contraband that took place on the coasts of Cartagena and Santa Marta, mainly gold and silver export and the clandestine import European goods. We shall examine this in more detail when we discuss commerce. For now, suffice it to say that it was considered the most intense case of contraband in Spanish America, and that to control it, Santa Fe was provided with all sorts of instruments to rein in the coastal smugglers. As a result, anything that implied any sort of opening was rejected by the Andean governments, which, as we shall see later in this work, saw their own economic plans threatened by the uncontrolled boom of contraband.

34  The Colombian Caribbean Important developments in foreign trade also had a profound influence on the personality of the Colombian Caribbean in the final days of the colonial regime. Until 1774, Cartagena de Indias was the only port legally authorized to conduct New Granada’s foreign trade. From the middle of the century to the beginning of the war with England in 1779, New Granada’s legal foreign trade remained approximately at two million pesos per year—​quite a modest number. Once peace was reestablished, and in the ten-​year period from 1785 to 1795, exports and imports doubled.25 A healthy growth of export/​import activities had certainly occurred, but it should be noted that the structure of legal trade did not change substantially. New Granada’s legal trade was noteworthy for being passive, even in the second half of the eighteenth century. From 1766 to 1777, the proportion of gold and local fruits in New Granada’s exports was 91 percent and 9 percent respectively (12 million pesos in gold and silver and 1,114,348 in fruits). From 1784 to 1793, it was 91.4 percent and 8.6 percent, respectively (19,209,035 pesos in gold and 1,843,559 in fruits).26 Only in the first decade of the following century was there an important change in the ratio between gold and fruits in New Granada’s exports.27 Referring to the meager participation of fruits in the legal trade with Spain, Juan Francisco de Moure pointed out that registered merchants lost that condition when their business was “limited to sugar, cocoa, and other fruits of the land,” and he added that those merchants were looked down upon as mere grocers.28 As in a vicious cycle, that negative attitude regarding the commercial importance of products of the land led to an increase in contraband, which was already significant in terms of the clandestine export of gold and silver, which in turn fed the central authorities’ mistrust of Caribbean producers, to the point of denying them any possibility of trading their fruits freely, thus further reinforcing the illegal trade. On the other hand, the declaration of hostilities by France in 1795 signaled the beginning of a period of wars for Spain, which culminated in the uprising of most of its colonies in 1810. During those final fifteen years, the legal trade lost the little vitality it still had and was almost entirely replaced by the illegal trade of goods. Contraband was a central phenomenon of the economic and social life of the Colombian Caribbean, as it was, in one way or another, in the entire surrounding region in general. It is not an overstatement to say that, in the late eighteenth century, it was an instrument for survival for both the lower classes and the elites. The preponderance of this illegal economy was the most noteworthy element of the coastal society in the eighteenth century, and contraband was the source of the great fortunes of its economic elites and of the development of its cities, also comprising a lifestyle and a set of values.29 The last thirty years of the colonial regime were chaotic, characterized by war and disorganization in the metropolis’s administration. Legal trade with Spain disappeared almost entirely, and Spanish ships stopped transporting clothing, wine, flour, olives, and the work instruments necessary for agricultural and

The Colombian Caribbean  35 maritime life, during long periods. The only option was contraband, not only to ensure the supply of important goods for the provinces of Santa Marta, Riohacha, and Cartagena, but to benefit all of New Granada. Therefore, what we saw in the final years of three centuries of imperial domination was the pitiful spectacle of a central authority that could no longer govern, since it was unable even to guarantee the supply of products to its overseas colonies, but that at the same time imposed a regime of prohibitions that eliminated the possibility of trading freely in the Caribbean ocean. Now, the fact that contraband emerged in this period as a preponderant activity does not mean that it was not already strongly present earlier. On the contrary, everything seems to indicate that it was a central activity throughout the entire eighteenth century and, as we shall see, was part of the very essence of the economic life of Santa Marta and Riohacha. Eliminating contraband on the coasts of New Granada was one of the major concerns of the Bourbon modernity with which the eighteenth century began. The viceroyalty was created, among other reasons, to attempt to control the smugglers, and to that end, a costly and useless coast guard fleet was commissioned from Mexico. Some officials reported that, among all American possessions, none suffered the “evil” of contraband to that extent. The king’s advisers estimated it at six million pesos at the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the legal trade did not surpass two million.30 In the stronghold of Cartagena, the field marshal and governor José de Zúñiga y Lazerda personally directed the illegal trade from English, French, and Dutch colonies, which passed through the province on its way to the Andes in large volumes from 1706 to 1713. The first viceroy, Jorge de Villalonga, together with his main subordinates, ignoring the metropolis’s instructions, devoted such efforts and imagination to increase the profits from the illegal trade that the Crown was compelled to remove him from office and imprison him in 1721, together with several of his accomplices, and to rescind the creation of the viceroyalty. In fact, until 1739, when the viceroyalty was reestablished under the command of Sebastián Eslava, an apparently assertive and honest military officer, every governor of Cartagena was a recalcitrant smuggler.31 In the provinces of Santa Marta and Riohacha, the situation was even worse. There, everything literally revolved around contraband. From 1700 to 1763, only one Spanish merchant ship arrived in the city of Santa Marta and none in Riohacha, and, to make things worse, in most of those years only a few reached Cartagena, which were far from supplying its own needs.32 In other words, the alternatives for the residents of Santa Marta and Riohacha were to negotiate with the outside world or to resign themselves to live without basic products such as clothing, work instruments, flour, and wine. Almost all foreign trade in those provinces was illegal, with a very important characteristic: differently from the city of Cartagena, where gold and silver remained almost the only export goods, in Santa Marta and Riohacha, products from the land became important early on; beef cattle, horses and mules, leather,

36  The Colombian Caribbean salt, and palo brasilete were an essential part of the trade with the Dutch, the English, and the French. The same thing happened in some places of the province of Cartagena, especially Tolú. The magnitude of the trade in cattle, leather, and other products of the land must have been large, if we consider that Riohacha’s illegal trade was estimated by a contemporary at three million pesos.33 The historian Grahn provides conclusive proof of the importance of contraband in the Colombian Caribbean in the eighteenth century. According to the author, in some years, the treasury’s revenues from sales and fines charged for products seized in Cartagena were quite high, compared to those obtained from the legal trade, and they were far above the latter in the cases of Santa Marta and Riohacha; in sum, even though the seizures constituted only a tiny portion of the total illegal trade conducted in those lands, they were a substantial source of income for the three provinces. The numbers are impressive: in Cartagena, the sales and fines derived from seizures were equivalent to 50 percent of the total revenues of the treasury in 1715, 1735, and 1741, and between 1715 and 1765, they accounted for 13 percent. In the other two coastal provinces, contraband played an even more decisive role: in Santa Marta, in 1706 and 1711, for example, the revenues derived from the illegal trade made up 70 percent of the total revenue; in 1728, they made up 51percent, and in other five years (1727, 1735, 1736, 1743, and 1753), they generated more than 25 percent of the treasury’s revenues. In Rioacha, between 1743 and 1765, seizures produced 250 percent more revenues for the treasury than legal imports, and usually represented 20 percent or more of the annual revenues in the same period.34 Throughout the eighteenth century, with the exception of very brief periods (the 1740s, for example), contraband in the Colombian Caribbean was a daily and open activity. In Riohacha, dozens of foreign ships negotiated freely in a commerce that brought together, beyond ethnic prejudices and retrograde animosities, Europeans of different and conflicting nationalities, Indians, Mestizos, Zambos, mulattos, and Black people. In Cartagena, the governors themselves allowed entire fleets of French and English smugglers to enter the port, in violation of every security measure of the stronghold. In Tolú, the trade was so normal that foreign merchants built fortresses with the population’s consent to defend themselves from the Spanish, and Sabanilla, in Tierradentro, became a no-​man’s-​ land, a Roland’s Cave where nothing distinguished authorities from smugglers.35 Now then, in the midst of important deals, of the acquisition of large amounts of goods to be taken inland, there was also an intense retail trade whereby common people of the Caribbean coasts got accustomed to obtain clothing and other necessary smuggled goods in exchange for their own products.36 V Nothing is therefore further from the truth than the image of a seigneurial Caribbean subjected to the order of laws and religion, as the historian Gabriel Porras Troconis described it half a century ago, in a work that would be

The Colombian Caribbean  37 unthinkable today.37 Judging from testimonies of that period, the Caribbean was disorder above all and a peripheral or marginal life—​at least in the eighteenth century. Reading the descriptions by the governors and prelates of Santa Marta confirms this fact. Disorder was the rule. Constant conflicts between governors and bishops, lower officials and town priests, as well as indolence, indifference, and passion for gambling appear once and again in the reports stored in the Archive of the Indies. All of this defined everyday life in a city that did not grow, that lived in constant fear of pirates who had already devastated it fourteen times in that century, forcing the population to live in the hills, and where the two main sources of wealth were stealing from the Spanish state and engaging in contraband, which were in fact one and the same.38 Life in Cartagena, the first city in the region and a home to viceroys, as its traditional historians like to call it, was not far from life in Santa Marta, in spite of its greater progress. In October 1718, Antonio de la Pedroza, a member of Spain’s Council of the Indies, went to Santa Fe de Bogotá with the mission of establishing the Viceroyalty of New Granada. On the way to that city, he remained several months in Cartagena, and while he was in the port, he discovered a very large fraud against the royal treasury, in which almost all the most important politicians were involved. On April 25, 1718, he sent a letter to the king informing him of his decision to discharge the governor of the province, Gerónimo Badillo, and the Royal Treasury officials Bartolomé Tienda de Cuervo and José Ruiz de Zenzano. In his report, Pedroza bitterly complained that, in Cartagena, political corruption was a public phenomenon. According to him, the laws did not work and it was impossible to govern with them, and no attention was paid to official certificates and personal testimonies because they were like commodities. For Pedroza, there was no conscience and money and power governed everything, since whoever had both always won.39 Thirty years later, in 1739, the travelers Ulloa and Juan left a splendid description of Cartagena’s port city customs. Comparing it to a third-​rate European city, they portrayed it as a boisterous town full of working-​class taverns and a social elite characterized by idleness, gambling, and lack of opportunities.40 Well into the nineteenth century, José Ignacio de Pombo highlighted what since the mid-​eighteenth century was the norm in Cartagena’s life: the presence of many unemployed Black and mulatto people loafing around the city. In addition, Cartagena, like Santa Marta and Mompox, was a center for contraband, perhaps the most important of all. On the other hand, in the province of Riohacha, there was practically no civil society. The capital city had been attacked by pirates as many times or more than Santa Marta, burned to the ground by Drake, and under constant terror due to the endless sieges by Guajiro Indians. The latter were the only true society that existed as such in the peninsula, and even though the Spanish considered them barbarians, they maintained a vast, profitable, and simultaneous trade with at least four different European nations.41

38  The Colombian Caribbean Illegality was therefore one of the most prominent features of the Colombian Caribbean. The entire society participated in the illegal economy as their only chance for survival—​from Black people who surreptitiously unloaded the goods to the respectable bishops, governors, and merchants. Everyone was endowed with a transgressive psychology, to the point that Viceroy Mendinueta desperately requested the bishop of Cartagena to excommunicate smugglers as a last resource to curb the practice. Of course, he failed.42 In this regard, the Caribbean constituted a society governed by the codes of illegality. Together with these transgressive practices and mentalities, which originated in urban centers, in most of the Colombian Caribbean there was no civil society of any sort. There was a complete lack of institutional controls, because men and women lived on the margins of Spanish society. More than half of the population continued to do so as late as the mid-​eighteenth century, as we mentioned above, without Spanish or Creole priests or judges to answer to. Referring to the colonial society’s failure to incorporate them, the founder of towns Antonio de la Torre y Miranda made a most ethnocentric description of the marginal population of the Caribbean coast: Descendants of defectors from the troops and the navy, of the many stowaways […] of enslaved and runaway Blacks who, having murdered or committed other crimes, sought refuge from their excesses in dispersion […] and of many Indians who, mixed with Mestizo, Black, or Mulatto women, gave rise to a myriad of casts difficult to ascertain […] who lived in the utmost neglect, idleness, and sloth, given to drunkenness and other vices common to an unrestrained life.43 As a result of the preponderance of a culture of illegality, the type of deritualized relations that such a culture generated among the individuals who practiced it, and the absence of an institutional life in vast areas of its territory, the Colombian Caribbean constituted a more open society in the late eighteenth century than is commonly believed. At least it was much more so than what it became in the period of ruin and inertia that was the nineteenth century. The key to all of this is perhaps the fact that illegality, in the form of contraband of all sorts, was not only the way the Caribbean coast engaged with a broader market, which allowed it, especially in times of crisis, to guarantee supplies for the coast and the Andean interior, but also conditioned the lifestyle and culture of thousands of both distinguished and common people. VI What is fascinating is that, together with this lack of “civilization,” in the same space and time, in urban centers like Cartagena and Mompox, a small enlightened and refined society with European tastes developed and matured. Cartagena was

The Colombian Caribbean  39 witness to the existence of a small group of sophisticated merchants who could read in several European languages, who regularly followed the situation of the most advanced Western nations, and who dreamed of the economic progress, liberalism, and spiritual life of European capitals. These merchants, together with small groups of lawyers, priests, military officers, and politicians, yearned to undertake the Western modernizing project in the exuberant and contradictory lands of the Caribbean, surrounded by rebellious Indians, runaway Blacks, and stateless Mestizos, whom they profoundly despised and whom they considered nothing but inferior beings. It was not by chance that the most enlightened and liberal of its members referred to American life in the following terms: “The greatest sacrifice that a talented man can make is to dedicate his existence to darkness and barbarism, when he could live in the midst of light and among rational beings.”44 However, these small urban elites were unable to constitute even a regional power. In spite of their modernizing fervor, the geography, the immense backwardness, and the lack of the most elementary communications infrastructure did not allow them to go beyond their immediate surroundings. The powerful merchants of Cartagena were unable to impose control over the rival elites of Mompox and Santa Marta, or over the rebellious Indians of the Guajiro or Darien regions, or over the runaway Blacks of maroon communities, or over the thousands of arrochelados who continued to prefer life in the marshes and swamps to the institutionalization of a regulated existence in Spanish towns. Beyond their immediate surroundings, the authority of Cartagena’s governors had no real effect. Spain’s political crisis in the early nineteenth century aggravated all of these contradictions and further radicalized the various forces. As was to be expected in a region that was very much a frontier and was immersed in chaos and marginality, the result was quite incoherent and in many ways highly irrational. With this background, it is worth examining in detail the social formation of Cartagena de Indians, the center of the Colombian Caribbean during the Colony, before reexamining its role in the failed attempts to form a nation after the declaration of independence from the Spanish empire. Notes 1 In the development of this notion of a process whereby the coast is transformed into the “other,” the work of Edward Said was most useful, especially his Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979). 2 Francisco José de Caldas, Semanario del Nuevo Reino de Granada, 3 vols. (Bogotá, 1943); Pedro Fermín Vargas, “Pensamientos políticos sobre la agricultura, comercio y minas del Virreinato de Santa Fe de Bogotá” and “Memoria sobre la población del Nuevo Reino de Granada,” in Pensamientos políticos (Bogotá: Editorial Procultura, 1986). 3 See especially Caldas, “Estado de la geografía del Virreinato de Santa Fe de Bogotá, con relación a la economía y al comercio,” and “El influjo del clima sobre los seres

40  The Colombian Caribbean organizados,” in Semanario del Nuevo Reino de Granada, vol. I, pp. 15–​54 and 136–​196. 4 The Consulados de Comercio (Consulates of Commerce) were merchant guilds that functioned as commercial courts in charge of enforcing commercial laws. Since these bodies were quite different from the modern connotation of the term “consulate,” we have chosen to leave “Consulado de Comercio” in Spanish throughout this book. (T.N.) 5 Expediente sobre la formación del consulado de Santa Fe, 1796, in AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 957. 6 For further discussions of frontiers as cultural objects, see Robin Wells, “Frontier Systems as a Sociocultural Type,” in Papers in Anthropology, vol. 14, no. 1 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973): 6–​15; Beverly Stoelje, “Making the Frontier Myth: Folklore Process in a Modern Nation,” Western Folklore 46 (October 1987): 235–​253; Kerwin Klein, “Frontier Tales: The Narrative Construction of Cultural Borders in Twentieth-​Century California,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 34 (July 1992): 464–​490; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992. For a more historical approach to the topic, see Alistair Hennessy, The Frontier in Latin American History (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978), pp. 253–​304. One application of the concept of frontier to Colombian history can be found in Claudia Steiner, “Héroes y banana en el golfo de Urabá: la construcción de una frontera conflictiva,” in Territorios, regiones, sociedades, ed. Renán Silva (Bogotá: Coedición Cerec-​ Universidad del Valle, 1994), pp. 137–​149. 7 It is very difficult to describe the territory of the three provinces that comprised the Caribbean region with precision. I do not know of a single eighteenth-​century document that contains an approximate estimate of its area. Without such information, I merely added the extension of the current-​day departments of the Caribbean coast in the Urabá area, as they appear in the records of the Codazzi Institute, Geografía de Colombia, vol. I (Bogotá, 1984), p. 270. 8 Fidalgo, “Expedición Fidalgo,” in Antonio Cuervo, Colección de documentos inéditos sobre la geografía y la historia de Colombia, vol. I (Bogotá, 1891), p. 55. Colonel Fidalgo’s expedition was the first to conduct a study of the geography of the Colombian Caribbean coast. In addition to the very useful data on the geophysical conditions of the region, it provides priceless commentaries on the social life of its inhabitants. 9 Antonio Julián, S. J., La perla de la América. Provincia de Santa Marta (Madrid, 1787; Bogotá, 1980), p. 154. 10 Antonio Narváez de la Torre, “Informe de Santa Marta y Río Hacha, 1778,” in Escritos de dos economistas coloniales: don Antonio de Narváez y la Torre y don José Ignacio de Pombo, ed. Sergio Elías Ortiz (Bogotá: Banco de la República, 1965), p. 36. Regarding the Chimilas’ subjection, see Carlos Uribe T., “La rebelión chimila en la provincia de Santa Marta durante el siglo XVIII,” in Estudios Andinos, n.13 (Lima, 1977). 11 Ernesto Restrepo Tirado, Historia de la Provincia de Santa Marta (Madrid, 1921). This book contains the best account published on colonial life in a province of the Colombian Caribbean. 12 Regarding the Guajiro Indians, see Josefina Moreno and Alberto Tarazona, Materiales para el estudio de las relaciones inter-​étnicas en la Guajira, siglo XVIII. Documentos y mapas (Caracas: Biblioteca de la Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1984); Allan

The Colombian Caribbean  41 J. Kuethe, “La Campaña Pacificadora en la frontera de Riohacha (1772–​1779),” in Huellas, 19 (Barranquilla: Universidad del Norte, 1987), pp. 9–​17; René de la Pedraja, “La Guajira en el siglo XIX,” in Desarrollo y Sociedad, 6 (Bogotá: CEDE, 1981), pp. 327–​359. 13 Fidalgo, “Expedición Fidalgo,” pp. 210, 184–​185, 190–​198, and 209–​209. 14 Ibid., pp. 191–​195. Antonio Caballero y Góngora, “Relación de Mando,” in Relaciones e informes de los gobernantes, comp. Germán Colemnares, vol. I (Bogotá: Fondo de Promoción de la Cultura del Banco Popular, 1989), pp. 459–​467. 15 Orlando Fals Borda, Mompox y Loba (Bogotá: Carlos Valencia Editores, 1981), pp. 162–​164. 16 On the settlement of the province of Santa Marta, see Poblamiento de la provincia de Santa Marta, comp. José de Mier, 3 vols. (Bogotá: Colegio Colombiano de las Academias, 1987); on the case of Tierradentro, see José A. Blanco, El norte de Tierradentro y los orígenes de Barranquilla (Bogotá: Banco de la República, 1986) and Atlántico y Barranquilla en la época colonial (Barranquilla: Ediciones de la Gobernación del Atlántico, 1993); on the province of Cartagena, see Gilma Mora de Tovar, “Poblamiento y sociedad en el Bajo Magdalena durante la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII,” in Anuario colombiano de historia social de la cultura, n.21 (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional, 1993); María Dolores González, “La política de población y pacificación indígena en las poblaciones de Santa Marta y Cartagena (Nuevo Reino de Granada) 1750–​1800,” in Boletín Americanista, n. 28 (Barcelona, 1978). For a critical examination of the population work of Antonio de la Torre y Miranda, see Manuel Lucena G., “Las nuevas poblaciones de Cartagena de Indias, 1774–​1794,” in Revista de Indias, Vol. 53, no. 199 (Madrid, 1993), pp. 761–​784. 17 José de Mier (comp.), Poblamiento de la Provincia de Santa Marta (Bogotá: Colegio de las Academias Colombianas, 1987), vol. I; Julián, La perla de la América, pp. 96–​97; Narváez de la Torre, “Informe de Santa Marta,” p. 36; Padrón General del Virreinato de la Nueva Granada, 1778–​1780, in Antonio Caballero y Góngora, “Relación de Mando,” cuadro A; Padrón General de la Provincia de Santa Marta, 1793, AGI: Indiferente General, legajo 1527; Restrepo Tirado, Historia de la Provincia de Santa Marta. 18 On Antonio de la Torre, see Pilar Moreno de Ángel, Antonio de la Torre y Miranda. Viajero y poblador (Bogotá: Editorial Planeta Colombiana, 1993). 19 Francisco Silvestre estimated the Guajiro population at 40,000 in 1778. Antonio Narváez de la Torre estimated it at 30,000 for that same year. See Silvestre, Apuntes reservados, p. 50; Narváez de la Torre, “Informe de Santa Marta,” p. 36. On the maroon communities, see Orlando Fals Borda, Capitalismo, hacienda y poblamiento en la costa Atlántica (Bogotá: Editorial Punta de Lanza, 1976), p. 70. 20 The term arrochelados referred to inhabitants of rochelas, places that were distant from institutional life, in marshes or deep in the forest. 21 For a more detailed critical study of the 1778 census regarding the population of the Colombian Caribbean, see Alfonso Múnera, “Mestizaje e identidad en el Caribe colombiano,” paper presented at the XXII International Conference of the Association of Caribbean Studies, Barranquilla, 1997. 22 Censo de la provincia de Cartagena de 1778, in AGN: Colección Ortega Ricaurte, caja 37.

42  The Colombian Caribbean 2 3 Ibid. 24 Expediente sobre la formación de un tribunal de comercio en Cartagena, 1775. AGI: Consulado, legajo 798. 25 José I. de Pombo, “Informe sobre la creación del consulado de comercio,” AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 647. 26 Pogonyi, “The Search for Trade,” p. 20. 27 See José I. de Pombo, “Informe del consulado de comercio, 1807,” AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 742. 28 In “Expediente sobre la formación de un tribunal de comercio en Cartagena,” AGI: Consulado, legajo 798. 29 On contraband in the Colombian Caribbean, see Lance Grahn, “Contraband, Commerce, and Society in New Granada, 1713–​1763” (PhD diss., Duke University, 1985); Celestino Arauz, El contrabando holandés en el Caribe durante la primera mitad del siglo XVIII (Caracas, 1984), vol. I, pp. 247–​285, and vol. II, pp. 135–​195; Orlando Fals Borda, Mompox y Loba, pp. 81–​92; José I. de Pombo, “Informe del Real Tribunal del Consulado al señor Virrey del Reyno sobre el origen y las causas del contrabando, sus perjuicios, los medios de evitarlo y de descubrir los fraudes,” June 1800, AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 960, and “Memorias sobre el contrabando en el Virreinato de Santa Fe,” 1804, AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 960. Regarding contraband, I found very useful information in the following works: Colmenares, Relaciones e informes; Julián, La perla de la América; Becker and Groot, El Nuevo Reino de Granada en el siglo XVIII; and Roberto Arrázola, Secretos de la historia de Cartagena (Cartagena: Tipografía Hernández, 1967). 30 Grahn, “Contraband, Commerce,” p. 9. 31 Arauz, “El contrabando holandés,” vol. II, pp. 147–​160; and Grahn “Contraband, Commerce,” p. 41. 32 Ibid, p. 148. “Informe del Virrey Guirior sobre contrabando,” AGI, legajo 960. 33 Virrey Mendinueta a Secretaría de Indias, AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 782. 34 Grahn, “Contraband, Commerce,” pp. 49, 95, 150, and 203. 35 See Arauz, “El contraband holandés,” vol. II, chapters VI and IX. 36 Virrey Pedro Mendinueta al rey. AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 960. 37 Gabriel Porras Troconis, Cartagena hispánica (Bogotá: Biblioteca Básica de la Cultura Colombiana, 1947), p. 50. 38 The best description of this social disorder can be found in Restrepo Tirado, Historia de la Provincia de Santa Marta. 39 Antonio de la Pedroza y Guerrero al rey, in El Nuevo Reino de Granada en el siglo XVIII, ed. Jerónimo Becker and José M. Rivas Groot (Madrid, 1921), p. 251. 40 Juan, Jorge and De Ulloa, Antonio, Voyage to South America, trans. John Adams, abridged ed. (New York, 1964), p. 43. 41 See Restrepo Tirado, Historia de la Provincia de Santa Marta; Moreno, Materiales. 42 Pedro Mendinueta al obispo de Cartagena. AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 961. 43 Antonio de la Torre, “Informe sobre poblamiento de la provincia de Cartagena,” AGI: Santa Fe, 640. 44 In Guillermo Hernández de Alba, Archivo epistolar del sabio naturalista José Celestino Mutis, vol. IV (Bogotá), p. 102.

3 Cartagena de Indias Progress and crisis in a former trading post of enslaved people

I In June 1618, Carlos Orta, an Italian Jesuit, impressed with Cartagena’s cosmopolitan airs, wrote: In terms of foreigners, no other known city in the Americas has as many as this one; it is an emporium of all nations; from here, they trade with Quito, Mexico, Peru, among other kingdoms; there is gold and silver here. But the most extensively exploited commodity are Black slaves.1 At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Cartagena de Indias was already the most important stronghold of the Spanish Caribbean defense system, one of the authorized ports in Spanish possessions in America to introduce enslaved Black people, and the central station for the Galleon Fleet in their trade with South and Central America.2 The combination of these three characteristics gave the city a dynamism and an air of progress it never had before or after, turning it into the center of economic, political, and military power in the Colombian Caribbean and endowing it with an importance in the Crown’s eyes that, within the borders of the Audiencia of New Granada, not even Santa Fe had, in spite of its condition as the seat of the central government. Its privileged geography was the main factor for its development. Located in the South Caribbean, the point of entry to the interior of extraordinarily vast territories that led to the Andean centers of gold and silver production, with one of the largest, calmest and safest bays of America, it was a key point in Spain’s communications and interchange system with its American colonies, as well as its defense system. The monopoly of foreign trade and the trade of enslaved people radically transformed Cartagena’s social life, endowing it with a peculiar identity in the New Granadan context. The decisive element in this transformation was the massive import of dozens of thousands of Black people, most of whom remained in the city until they were sent to Peru, Quito, Panama, and the interior of New

DOI: 10.4324/9781003381198-4

44  Cartagena de Indias Granada. The ease with which they were imported and later acquired by the Cartagena elites modified the population’s composition. The Indigenous encomienda lost importance with the dramatic decrease in the number of natives, who were replaced by an increasing number of Black people as labor in the haciendas and urban settlements. Differently from other important cities of New Granada, including those of the Colombian Caribbean, Cartagena de Indias stood out since the seventeenth century for being a predominantly Black and mulatto city.3 But that was not the only change. The city was full of foreigners—​especially Portuguese and Dutch involved in the business of slavery—​to the point that the Crown decided to establish there the Tribunal of the Inquisition for the Caribbean and the north of South America, with the main purpose of repressing the activities of the Jews, Protestants, and heretics of various nationalities, attracted to the port by business opportunities.4 The establishment of the Galleon Fleet, which could remain there for years, turned Cartagena, together with Portobelo in Panama, into the only center authorized to engage in commerce between South America and Spain. Merchants from all of New Granada, Quito, and even Peru went to Cartagena with bags full of gold and silver to purchase goods and enslaved people.5 The city thus acquired early on its status as the commercial center of New Granada, and with it another important reason to provide it with the security required by a stronghold. Attracted by its riches, pirates and corsairs continuously attacked it, and in 1697 it was completely pillaged by the French pirate Jean Bernal Desjean, Baron of Pointis6—​the final episode in a series of events and decisions that negatively affected it and led to profound changes in its nature.7 The trade of enslaved people had declined significantly and the dubious honor as the main slave port of Spanish America passed on to Buenos Aires, which was now the main supplier to Peru.8 Cartagena entered the eighteenth century ruined and abandoned, as a consequence of the pirates’ pillage. Pointis’s attack took place when the fleet was expected to arrive at the port at any moment, and therefore many merchants were there with large sums of money to purchase goods. By taking possession of that capital, Pointis caused the bankruptcy of Cartagena’s commerce, already affected by the decline of the fleet system and the end of the monopoly of the import and sale of enslaved people.9 In 1703, only eight Spaniards remained in the city, and the 1708 census reported fewer than 400 White people.10 II In 1735, when Cartagena had recovered quite a bit of its former liveliness, Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa wrote a memorable description of the city’s social and economic life.11 In it, they made a fine portrait of the composition of Cartagena’s society, using the racial element as a factor of analysis. Thanks to these enlightened Spaniards, we can have a broad image of Cartagena in the first

Cartagena de Indias  45 half of the eighteenth century, with which we can measure the magnitude of the social changes that took place in the last years of the Colony. The overwhelming presence of Black and mulatto people defined Cartagena’s social universe as described by the Spanish sages. “They are the only people,” they say, “who are seen in the city, the haciendas, and the towns.” They were the labor force in the surrounding haciendas, they worked as artisans, and they performed all other minor trades in a port and military city such as Cartagena de Indias. In addition to the Blacks and mulattos, a “poor and miserable” White population grew, which preferred to loaf around the city, for, “whether they are Creoles or European rookies in America, they disdain such a debasing occupation [manual work], desiring to work in nothing other than commerce.”12 It is interesting to note that, when analyzing the composition of the working-​class sectors, Juan and Ulloa do not mention at all, not a single time, the Indigenous presence, which demonstrates to what extent the population in Cartagena was different from the rest of the Colombian Caribbean and from New Granada in general, becoming a sort of slaveholding enclave of predominantly Black enslaved people, in the midst of a more heterogeneous society still greatly influenced by native cultures. The presence of the Black and mulatto sectors was so preponderant that Juan and Ulloa do not fail to observe a quite significant cultural behavior. “They are all so proud of the cast to which they belong,” they say, “that if by accident you call them with the name of a lower cast, they are greatly offended and cannot accept being deprived of such a precious gift of fortune.”13 On the other hand, the inquisitorial trials demonstrate that the social and religious practices of the Black population were widespread in the city, even among Spaniards and the so-​called Whites of the land.14 However, what is also apparent in Juan and Ulloa’s account is that, by the 1730s, most Blacks and mulattos lived in misery, in a society that was just beginning to recover from the disasters of the late seventeenth century and that still lacked the dynamism it would enjoy several decades later. The city’s economic elite was exclusively composed of “White” people. In a society that seemed to have lost its former cosmopolitanism, the small group of people born in Spain, say Juan and Ulloa, “control all the commerce in this place,” while “the families of White Creoles administer the interests of the land.” Among the latter, some had large haciendas and were part of an aristocracy founded on lineage distinction and the fact that they were the descendants of former Spanish officials who had come to the colony to hold honorable positions. However, according these illustrious voyagers, the future of the descendants of that elite was far from promising. Since there was no army or navy and only a very small bureaucracy, and it was therefore impossible to build wealth with those traditional occupations, most of them spent their time in idleness, gambling, and drinking. Everything seems to indicate that the military officer corps was minimal, due to the stronghold’s state of neglect,15 and that as late as the mid-​ eighteenth century, Cartagena de Indias did not appear to have entirely recovered from the economic and social decadence of the late seventeenth century, when

46  Cartagena de Indias it lost its privileged position in the trade of enslaved people and in commerce with Peru. Its merchant community was very small and composed exclusively of Spaniards.16 Only in the 1760s did a new dynamic bring about profound changes in Cartagenan life, and in this new dynamic, the transformations that the various social classes underwent in the second half of the eighteenth century profoundly affected the city’s relations with Santa Fe and with the Spanish Crown. III These changes were fostered by the spirit of reform that inspired Charles III’s officials and that, in the particular case of Cartagena, took the form of a renewal of its military structure and the momentary expansion of its legal commerce.17 Spain’s humiliating defeat in the Seven Years’ War and the temporary possession of Cuba by the English convinced the Spanish Crown of the urgent need to modernize the defense system of the Spanish Indies in order to maintain the empire intact and introduce mechanisms to guarantee its strength with minimal costs to the royal treasury. Given its long tradition as a strategic stronghold of the Caribbean and its role defending the inland territories of New Granada and Peru, Cartagena was the main focus of the Bourbon military reforms in New Granada. The city’s military life, like everything else, had been seriously impacted by the general commercial decline that had affected Cartagena since the late seventeenth century and that led to the pillage by the forces of the Baron of Pointis in 1697. In 1735, the year when Juan and Ulloa arrived at the port, the stronghold was protected only by 179 men out of the 430 it had in 1691, and its military equipment was practically abandoned.18 In 1736, a process of recovery began, which allowed it to successfully confront the powerful fleet of the English admiral Edward F. Vernon in 1739.19 However, progress was slow and mired in setbacks. In 1773, the year when the reform began in full force, the Fixed Regiment of Cartagena only had 621 men. As of that year, it grew considerably, and by 1780 it had 1,312 soldiers and 200 men in the artillery, in addition to the White and Pardo veterans of the militias, which had 1,890 soldiers.20 But the reform not only involved military personnel. Just as important were the immense investments in fortifications, whose construction also required mobilizing large numbers of people. In only one such construction, the closure of the entry to the Bay of Cartagena through Bocagrande, more than one and a half million pesos were spent from 1771 to 1777.21 In the general budget presented to the king, the engineer Antonio Arévalo estimated that a minimum labor force of 500 men was required to carry it out.22 In 1771, 600 experienced artisans were already working on the complex construction of the wall and the navy’s seawall.23 To build the latter, which was to protect the city from the sea at one of its most vulnerable points, no less than half a million pesos were needed.24 In the last thirty years of the colonial period, builders worked tirelessly to finish the

Cartagena de Indias  47 system of bastions and defensive walls that turned Cartagena into the most fortified city in America, including the castle of San Felipe de Barajas, the costliest and most imposing fort built in American colonies.25 Maintaining the military personnel assigned to the stronghold and financing the fortresses required an extremely high annual investment that the city’s revenues could not cover. From 1766 to 1777, Cartagena spent an average of 550,000 pesos per year to maintain them, while its official revenues amounted to no more than 200,000 pesos per year. The other 350,000 pesos were obtained from the so-​called situado, which came mostly from the provinces of New Granada, as well as from Quito and Mexico. Of the 623,380 pesos declared as treasury expenses for Cartagena in 1777, 373,000 were spent on fortification works and maintaining the army—​that is, more than 50 percent.26 In 1810, one year before the complete declaration of independence, the city received between 300,000 and 400,000 pesos to pay for its costly military function.27 The Crown’s insistence on strengthening Cartagena militarily, in a more systematic and permanent manner in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, had a number of important consequences for the city. First, Cartagena de Indias was consolidated as New Granada’s stronghold to defend it from foreign threats and became the center of military power to maintain internal peace. The first great uprising in the interior against the Spanish government—​the Comuneros Revolution—​was put down by the Fixed Regiment of Cartagena.28 Second, fully assuming the role of a military stronghold increased the city’s dependence on outside resources. Now, in addition to the money sent through Mexico and Quito, all the provinces of New Granada had to send their surplus to cover Cartagena’s maintenance. The budget of the Caribbean port was almost twice that of Santa Fe, seat of the viceroy and the Royal Audiencia.29 Third, there was significant population growth. About 800 new soldiers, many of them with families, joined the Fixed Regiment from 1772 to 1780.30 Fourth, the investments of millions of pesos to maintain a fixed army and for military works implied a healthy injection into the city’s ailing economy, and one of the most important consequences of the military investments was the growth of the artisan community. Finally, the firm establishment of the Pardo militias, with the corresponding military privileges—​as Allan Kuethe has studied—​was a key factor in the transformations experienced by the group of mulatto artisans, which we will discuss further in this work.31 On the other hand, Cartagena’s commerce had developed significantly in the two decades following the 1760s. The last galleon fleet arrived in the city in 1739. As a consequence of the war, which began one year earlier, and the lack of commerce, Cartagena lost its merchant community, most of whom had returned to Spain, including the representatives from the Escuela de Cargadores de Cádiz. Until 1756, there were no commercial agents from Cadiz in Cartagena; the only ones in New Granada were in Panama, Guayaquil, and Quito, and in 1757, there were only fifteen Spanish merchants living in Cartagena.32

48  Cartagena de Indias However, in 1778, twenty-​one years later, there were at least fifty,33 and from 1784 to 1793, the only ten continuous years of peace in the Spanish empire in the last forty years of colonial domination over New Granada, the legal trade doubled relative to a similar period immediately prior to the 1779–​1783 war. Everything seems to indicate that a significant revival of commerce with Spanish ports had begun, even though it never surpassed very modest levels compared to the commercial activity of other Spanish colonies in America. After 1795, imperial wars destroyed the short-​lived boom in the legal trade.34 The old debate about whether this modest progress was due to the impact of free trade regulations is no longer important. The structure of legal trade remained essentially unaltered and succumbed forever with the war of 1795. More important to understanding the approaching political events is to comprehend how the presence of a new community of merchants affected the character of Cartagena’s society in the late eighteenth century. Was it any different from the previous ones? In fact, it was the first time that one could speak of the existence of a merchant community in Cartagena. According to Juan and Ulloa, the traditional pattern observed by them in the first half of the eighteenth century was for the merchants to assume that their sojourn in the port was a temporary business affair. They neither felt nor acted as members of the Cartagenan society, and they returned to their places of origin in Spain as soon as they could.35 In contrast, twenty of the fifty merchants recorded in 1780 had married and had established their main place of residence in Cartagena. Some of them were among the richest and most influential people in local affairs. Since they were now part of the community, they were forbidden from belonging to the Escuela de Cargadores de Cádiz and were denied the privilege of being exempt from military service and of being tried by a merchant court. In 1775, they initiated a lawsuit against the privileges of those registered in the Cádiz Consulado, demanding the same rights, arguing precisely that they had deeper roots in American soil.36 In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the group of merchants living in the city controlled municipal politics and belonged to the upper social classes, even though, as late as 1780, some of them still performed humble trades as store merchants or clerks. In 1778, seven merchants were high officers in the militias, including the commanders of the White and Pardo militias, and in 1790, at least half of the council members, two of the ordinary mayors, and the public prosecutor were merchants.37 By the end of the century, the difference between those “registered” in the Cádiz Consulado and the “neighbors” had lost all practical importance, and the merchant community acted as a tightly knit body, aware of their power in the city’s internal affairs. They generally enjoyed the privileges and honors of social life. They financed and presided over popular and religious celebrations, organized the supply of foodstuffs during wartime, and purchased honorary distinctions at the end of their life, such as membership in the Spanish noble orders.38 They were surrounded by all sorts of luxury and a large number of enslaved servants. On the other hand,

Cartagena de Indias  49 however, the viceroy had no doubt that a significant number of the members of that distinguished merchant community belonged to the most powerful network of smugglers in the viceroyalty and probably in Spanish America. The military reform was highly beneficial to them. The expenses required to build the fortresses and to maintain a considerably army in the midst of the empire’s deepening crisis could only be covered through loans from the merchants, which were paid back when the funds arrived. The merchants obtained two important advantages from that financial system: on the one hand, they consolidated their political power with the dependence of military authorities on credit provided by them to cover their needs; on the other hand, they secured very significant profits, since most of the money they loaned was used to purchase products that they themselves sold.39 Perhaps the most evident consequence of the new attitude of Cartagena’s Spanish merchant community and its new ways of relating with America was not at all consciously pursued by them, but was rather a paradoxical product of the social dynamics and economic and political interests created by their participation in the life of the Caribbean port: almost all young Creole Cartagenan intellectuals who led the struggle for the independence of Cartagena in 1811 and governed the ephemeral Independent Republic of Cartagena until 1816 were sons of those merchants. In the second half of the eighteenth century, Cartagena de Indias controlled New Granada’s foreign trade and military apparatus. It was home to two of the most powerful elites in the viceroyalty: large merchants and senior officers of the military corps. In the same period, it also became the place of residence of a powerful group of large landowners in the Caribbean region. At the end of the century, Manuel Escobar, considered the wealthiest of all, had four haciendas and 182 enslaved workers dedicated to the production of molasses for the spirits monopoly. One of the haciendas, named Toro Hermoso, was the most valuable in the province—​it had 85 enslaved workers and was valued at 82,375 silver pesos. Andrés de Madarriaga, Count of Pestagua, and Micaela de Lanz, widow of Field Marshal Melchor de Navarrete, owned some of the largest cattle latifundia in New Granada. Manuel Canabal, owner of the San Pablo hacienda, with 101 enslaved people in 1780, was one of the large sugarcane growers in the region.40 IV The growth and consolidation of these social sectors contributed to the expansion of urban life fostered by the large investments to strengthen the military stronghold. The elites’ aristocratic behavior, with their psychological need for large numbers of servants and a lavish lifestyle, stimulated an increase in the number of enslaved people dedicated to domestic service and free Blacks and mulattos performing manual trades. It was perfectly normal for a hacienda owner or merchant to have in his main home in Cartagena more than

50  Cartagena de Indias ten enslaved servants, and there were cases, such as that of Paulina Melchora Gómez, widow of a wealthy merchant, who lived surrounded by twenty-​six enslaved servants.41 In 1752, the bishop of Cartagena spoke indignantly of the generalized custom in the upper classes of keeping dozens of enslaved people without a defined occupation. According to Bartolomé de Narváez, the owners forced them to go to the streets to earn a daily wage, sometimes performing dishonest activities.42 According to the 1778 census, Cartagena had little more than 13,000 inhabitants, not including those who lived outside of the walled sector. Like other ports of the Caribbean, the city had grown from the bay toward the open sea, reproducing the classical urban growth model of Spanish American cities around central plazas. The walled city was composed of four neighborhoods called Santa Catalina, San Sebastián, Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, and Santo Toribio, and another one called Getsemaní outside the city walls. In contrast with the urban segregation model of Andean cities, where the tendency was for the free population to distribute itself in neighborhoods according to trade and social class, in Cartagena, White, Brown and Black people, merchants, artisans, and enslaved people lived indistinctly in the same neighborhood. For example, the neighborhood of Santa Catalina, traditionally identified in historiography as the residence of the upper classes, especially large merchants, was also home to many free Blacks and mulattos.43 Although it is impossible to find neighborhoods exclusively inhabited by the White social elite and their servants, or by free Blacks and mulattos, we can speak of a certain tendency toward the formation of an urban social pattern that nonetheless does not deny the prevailing fact of social and ethnic discrimination. A large number of merchants lived in Santa Catalina, near the bay, while, as the city grew to the north, the Black and mulatto population advanced in the opposite direction, away from the bay. For example, Santo Toribio, on the city’s periphery, had fewer merchants and bureaucrats than Las Mercedes and San Sebastián, but it was also one of the neighborhoods with more Black and mulatto residents.44 Most of the free people living in Cartagena in 1780 belonged to families of artisans and soldiers. There were at least 1,000 artisans working in various tasks. The most abundant were tailors, shoemakers, and carpenters;45 they were spread out and mixed together in all of the city’s neighborhoods and its slum. Most of them were classified as mulattos, with a significant number of free and enslaved Black people. Only a very small minority was classified as White. In the neighborhood of Santa Catalina, 194 out of its 250 artisans were free mulattos or Blacks; fifty-​six were “Whites of the land.” Santo Toribio had 235 artisans, 208 of whom were Black or mulatto; only nineteen of whom were “Whites of the land.” In Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, sixty-​six of its seventy-​eight artisans were Black or mulatto, and two were White. Moreover, in the neighborhood of San Sebastián, ninety-​one of its 110 artisans were Black or mulatto, eight were

Cartagena de Indias  51 Spanish, and six were “Whites of the land.” In other words, more than 80 percent of the artisans recorded as such in 1778 were Black or mulatto.46 The description made by the general of the independence movement, Joaquín Posada Gutiérrez of Cartagena, in the early nineteenth century contributes to reconstructing the social structure of a city where race, and skin color in particular, was a determining factor in the life of individuals, sometimes as decisive as possessing wealth or a certain level of education. With the nostalgia of an old aristocrat, bolivariano no less, General Posada recreates the colonial city through the traditional celebrations of the Virgin of Candelaria, especially the dances and the social forms of its religious ceremonies: A great dance hall was full every night, without explicit invitation. The following was well known: the first dance was for the ladies, i.e. for pure White women, called Whites from Castile. Second dance: Pardas, which comprised the brown-​skinned mixtures of the primitive races. Third dance: free Black women. But it goes without saying that those who attended the dance men and women of their respective classes who occupied a certain relative social position and could dress well […] Custom had it that White men, who monopolized the title of gentlemen, like White women monopolized that of ladies, had the privilege of participating in all three dances; the Pardos participated in their own and that of the Black women; and Black people only the latter. It is symptomatic that in the final stages of the colonial period, free Blacks and mulattos danced in the same dance hall as the Whites from Castile. The public space of the celebrations of White people from Castile was not off-​limits to the immediately lower classes. As long as they could dress well and exhibited the “required education” to behave properly in such environments, Blacks and mulattos were included to a certain extent in the collective dances of the carnivalesque world of Cartagena. Of course, dressing well and behaving appropriately meant, as General Posada reminds us, “occupying a certain relative social position.” This was so, explains our old leader of the republican struggle, because for poor people, free and enslaved, Mulattos, Blacks, farmers, coalmen, cart drivers, fishermen, etc., there was no dance hall, nor could they have withstood the more or less rigid courtliness and circumspection that were observed in the gatherings of people with some education of all colors and races. Preferring the freedom that characterizes their class, they danced in the open to the deafening sound of the African drum, which is played, that is, beaten, with the hands on the leather, and men and women danced in a large circle, in pairs but without holding each other’s hands, going around the drum players.47

52  Cartagena de Indias Not being admitted to first-​class dances, and feeling superior to the second and third classes, the “Whites of the land” and cuarterones (people with one-​fourth Black ancestry) preferred to organize them at home, enjoying the company of Whites from Castile there. These latter categories of people included store merchants, doctors, pharmacists, painters, and silversmiths. It is not difficult to perceive that free mulattos and Black people with a “certain social position,” authorized to participate, with humiliating restrictions, in the same dance hall as White people from Castile, constituted a class of relatively educated and prosperous artisans who were eager to be recognized and accepted by the upper classes and who benefited from an urban tradition as a port of smugglers, far from the disciplinary norms of a plantation society. V One fact that has not been recorded by Colombian historiography, and that in my opinion is of the upmost importance in the outcome of the revolutionary events of 1809 and beyond, is the formation of that sort of class of Black and mulatto artisans in late eighteenth-​century Cartagena. Its prosperity was to a large extent the product of the changes in the city’s economy and population described above.48 The description made by Juan and Ulloa of Cartagena’s society in 1735 demonstrates that at that time, and no doubt since the seventeenth century, Blacks and mulattos monopolized the artisan trades. They did so as members of the lowest classes and for the sole reason that the so-​called “Whites of the land” and the Spanish considered it offensive to their honor to work in those trades. But in their report there is no mention whatsoever of the existence of a class of respectable and relatively prosperous mulattos, and when they describe the artisans, they portray them as living in the direst poverty.49 The considerable increase in the White population, the consolidation of social elites, and the flow of relatively large sums of capital destined to public works created the conditions for the emergence of a type of artisan who demanded better payment for their professional services and who satisfied the needs of the Cartagenan social elite, composed of merchants, landowners, military officials, bureaucrats, and Church dignitaries. Those artisans were also hired to perform very complex tasks in military construction work and in shipyards, especially building and fixing ships. Cartagena’s colonial architectural ensemble, with its large houses and sober churches, today considered a historical world heritage site, was, as far as we know, the work of Black and Mmulatto artisans.50 In 1778, we find some of them enjoying quite a prosperous life. They lived in “tall houses” and owned enslaved people, both of them symbols of a high social status among the so-​called Whites. Félix Herrera, a mulatto silversmith, is a good example. He lived with his wife and two children in one of the tall houses of the San Sebastián neighborhood and owned five enslaved people.51

Cartagena de Indias  53 In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the Pardo militia was another key instrument for this social group in the development of an esprit de corps, of a certain prestige and a certain respectability. Joining the militia was one the most common ways to improve the social status of a mulatto artisan.52 Almost all artisans of an eligible age belonged to the city’s Pardo militia, and some of them reached the higher ranks. The tailor Pablo Rodríguez, for example, was a captain in that militia.53 Still more revealing is the fact that, as early as 1750, there were cases of artisans who demanded an end to White people’s privileges over higher education. A feeling of equality with White people seems to have emerged among mulattos in conjunction with their new social condition, which allowed them to aspire to a more complete education. Cristóbal Polo presented a memorial to the Crown “requesting that his mulatto condition be disregarded so he could practice law, which he was forbidden from doing.”54 It is worth highlighting the matter because of what it reveals of social life in the Colombian Caribbean in the second half of the eighteenth century, in particular the emergence of a consciousness among mulattos in conflict over the privileges of the local elite. In 1749, Cristóbal Polo, who was no doubt sufficiently light-​skinned to be considered White, decided to settle in Cartagena as a lawyer, after having received the title of Doctor in Canon Law from Colegio de Santo Tomás and the Royal Audiencia of Santa Fe. Upon discovering his mulatto origins, a group of his Cartagena colleagues requested that he be forbidden from exercising that profession, which the city council did. In 1750, Polo requested the king’s intervention through a petition in which he stated that he was the legitimate son of a mulatto father and a cuarterona mother. His father, Martín Polo, was a militia captain in the prosperous town of Tenerife, in the province of Santa Marta, and in spite of being a mulatto, he must have had an important economic position in his town, since he financed with his own money the expedition of bow-​and-​arrow Indians who left for Cartagena in 1741 to help defend it against the siege by Admiral Vernon, and also paid for his son’s studies in Santa Fe de Bogotá. As late as 1765, Cristóbal Polo continued to struggle to be recognized as a lawyer in Cartagena, even though the government attorney and the Council of the Indies in Madrid were favorable to his cause. The government attorney supported him with the argument that he was a legitimate son and, more importantly, that Cartagena was a city where the presence of mulattos was normal.55 Unfortunately, the documents do not reveal whether Polo was able to practice law in Cartagena or was forced to move to another city. It is possible, however, that he died or left Cartagena without having obtained approval from the White elite to practice law. In 1810, Pedro Romero, a Pardo artisan and popular leader of Cartagena’s independence movement, requested the Crown “to allow his son to study philosophy, theology, and other topics, in spite of his mulatto condition,”56 and the

54  Cartagena de Indias next year he led the people’s forces that forced the Supreme Junta of Cartagena to radically separate from Spain. VI External capital investment in the form of the situado, the modest and transitory reemergence of the legal trade, the greater strength of social elites, and the significant phenomenon of a sort of mulatto middle class that aspired to being recognized, important as they were in many ways, should not lead us to overlook other circumstances that, while they give the impression of social chaos incompatible with the notion of an internally rational and coherent society, also allow us to have a more precise idea of the fragility of the social and political balance in the city in the late eighteenth century. In Cartagena de Indias, in spite of its military and commercial importance and its small group of Spanish noblemen and enlightened Creoles, there was something carnivalesque and parodic in daily life, giving the impression that it was an everyday subversion of the formally established order. In 1790, Governor Joaquín Pimienta, recently arrived in the city, was horrified by the filth he observed in the streets, even the main ones, which he described as nests of pestilence. Alarmed by the possibility of a serious plague and the indignity of living in such a place, he requested the king to allow him to force the resident owners to fix and register the streets in public records, because the government had no money to invest in public hygiene.57 Together with this feeling of physical pestilence, since the mid-​sixteenth century there had been systematic complaints by bishops and inquisitors against what they described as an environment of moral turpitude in Cartagena de Indias. As late as 1769, in the midst of renovations of the city, Bishop Diego Peredo wrote a long report to the Crown where he referred to the priests’ illegal and immoral practices, censuring the gargantuan meals consumed in some convents, the habit of many priests of enjoying contact with women from their parishes, and their engagement in contraband. Due to poverty, he said, many men and women live in the same room, sleeping together and participating in incest, concubinage, and other “infamous sins.” They do little or no work and give themselves to vices, drink, fights, and homicides. Finally, he reported that he ordered the detention of a large number of men who had settled in the city after abandoning their wives and children in their places of origin, and their shipment back to their native towns.58 Music and dance, with evident African connotations, were ever present on Cartagena’s streets. Most Church dignitaries denounced the bundes (popular dances and street festivities). They attempted to forbid them by all means possible, apparently to no avail. In 1781, the new bishop, Joseph Díaz de la Madrid, recently arrived from Quito, sent a letter to the Council of the Indies explaining the reasons why he considered bundes an extremely serious practice against morality. In the letter, he gave a description that is unparalleled in terms of the

Cartagena de Indias  55 density of prejudices against that dance and its popularity, in any case revealing of the almost non-​existent ideological control of the Spanish and Creole elites over the urban space. He said: Equal solution is required with the utmost effort of royal justice to forbid, on the eve of celebrations, the dances they commonly call bundes, at least after nine in the evening, to make sure that the people who participate in them do not miss mass the next day, as is often the case, not only in ranches and other places, but also in towns and cities, including this one, which is the capital of the province. Those who attend are Indians, Mestizos, Mulattos, Blacks, Zambos, and other people of the inferior class. All of them come together in a pack, with no order or separation of the sexes, men and women together. Some play, others dance, and all of them sing lascivious songs, making indecent movements with their bodies. In the intervals, they continuously drink spirits and other strong beverages they call guarapo and chicha, and these functions continue until daybreak. It is easy to see how much sin is encouraged by the darkness of the night, the continuous drinking, the licentiousness of the place, the mixture of the sexes, and the feverishness of the bodies, all of which leads to the most fatal consequences, as can be inferred. And with some of them drunken, others numbed, and everyone exhausted and sleepy, it follows that either they do not go to mass the next morning (which is usually the case) or they cannot attend to it with competent devotion. No measure I have taken has been successful in curbing these wrongs.59 Prostitution was another concern of governors and bishops. In 1750, Governor Salas sent a report to the Crown on the generalized practice of prostitution among enslaved Black women and the masters’ disinterest in curbing such practice, more interested as they were in making sure that the said women produced a daily income.60 One century before, the queen, in response to the many complaints from Cartagena, had determined in two decrees that Black enslaved women should be decently dressed when they went out to the street, which apparently did not happen, and that the owners’ custom of sending them to earn a wage at night should come to an end.61 The accounts we have of Cartagena since its foundation indicate that the city was never different, except in the short periods when it fell into a state of utter neglect. A carnivalesque environment with many foreign merchants and adventurers, many taverns and balls, Black and mulatto women forced to go out at night to earn a wage for their masters, dissolute priests and smugglers, and, of course, authorities and aristocrats neck deep in illegality and corruption, set the tone of everyday life in this Caribbean port where the Inquisition indulged in persecuting converted Jews and Black sorcerers.

56  Cartagena de Indias On the other hand, the elites and middle classes lived in a precarious state, under the constant threat of invasion, pillage, and destruction of the city. The threat was real and came from various directions. First, the one that most worried the Crown and its officials: the occupation of the military stronghold by a foreign enemy power, such as the English, who had attempted this in 1741. Second, the fear that the Guajiro Indians or the Cunas from Darién might join the English, French, or Dutch to attack the coasts. Third, the more constant fear, present since the sixteenth century: the mere possibility of a slave rebellion. In the early seventeenth century, a group of runaways took up arms and came very close to taking the city, sowing terror among the Spanish and Creoles.62 In 1794, in the midst of the Haitian Revolution, the authorities discovered a new conspiracy of enslaved people and free Black Frenchmen who had recently arrived in Cartagena to take and pillage the city. According to the governor of Maracaibo, there was an agreement between the Black people of that Venezuelan port and those of Cartagena and the Indians of the Guajira to rise up in armed rebellion against the Spanish empire.63 On the other hand, at the center of social life in Cartagena, in a fascinating contradiction of its status as a stronghold where large amounts of money were invested to ensure that it was impenetrable, was contraband, as intense or more than in any other part of the Caribbean. In 1792, the port’s merchants sent a letter to Viceroy Ezpeleta complaining about the growing activities of smugglers, and in his response, Ezpeleta accused them of being the true organizers and leaders of the widespread contraband, not only in Cartagena but in most of the Colombian Caribbean.64 In 1804, the enlightened José Ignacio de Pombo wrote to the king a shrewd analysis of the illegal trade in the province of Cartagena de Indias. The report’s introductory epigraph is a Latin and Spanish proverb that says, “Gossip passes and the metal remains at home.” In a footnote, Pombo adds: This immoral proverb is unfortunately all too common in practice due to the impunity enjoyed by those who profess it and their high esteem of wealth. So, certain of the former and the latter, they dare praise it, mocking virtue and disdaining talent.65 Later in the report, when referring to the possible consequences of his denunciation of the immorality that prevailed in Cartagena, he says: Two thousand leagues away from the Sovereign, in such corrupt countries where the law and citizens’ rights are so often disrespected, how can we expect sufficient candor and patriotism to express the causes and propose the most appropriate means to root out the disorder that is of such interest to so many individuals and to those who should prevent it? Are not the hatred of the former and the high-​handedness of the latter the product of his zeal?66

Cartagena de Indias  57 As we said before, governors, bishops, and even widows of the most distinguished lineage participated in the profitable business of contraband. Andrés Tomás de la Torre himself, appointed by the Crown as the first head of the Consulado de Comercio, whose purpose was to protect and stimulate legal commerce with Spain, was caught selling illegally imported foreign goods. It is worth highlighting this episode because it reveals better than any the parodic nature of life in the Colombian Caribbean and, of course, the senselessness of continuing to consider Cartagena’s merchants as mere brokers for the Cadiz merchants. De la Torre was precisely one of the most important brokers, so much so that the king granted him the honor of being appointed the first head of the Consulado de Comercio in 1795. However, he had no qualms about negotiating with foreign enemies against the interests of the Crown and of the business concerns in Cadiz, in his position as the highest leader of the guild of major merchants. Nor did he have any qualms in declaring himself guilty and confessing that everyone in Cartagena participated in contraband. With good reason, the governor of Cartagena warned the viceroy of the pressures and intrigues to distort truth in the case, which he considered clear as sunlight, and informed him that in Cartagena he could only count with the aid of his adviser. The same body of commerce that only a few months earlier had complained about the evils of contraband, closed ranks with their leader. De la Torre was declared innocent67 and continued to be one of the most influential people in Cartagena, becoming one of the leaders who created the city’s Supreme Governing Junta in 1810. The viceroys, the Audit Office of Santa Fe, and the determined interest and constant protests by Santa Fe merchants and landowners could do nothing against the contraband boom. Not even the extremely high annual budget of 100,000 pesos destined to the coast guard had positive results—​we saw the desperate viceroy Mendinueta invoking God’s punishment as a last resort before the obvious failure of his authority over the people of the land. Enslaved people, flour, textiles, and clothes, everything that was increasingly needed, was provided by the illegal trade. It is not by chance that Pedro Ledesma and Francisco de Varte stated, “Everything is perverted by avarice, cunning, and diligence in the ports of the Indies, especially in Buenos Aires and Cartagena.”68 VII A very important change took place almost imperceptibly in the midst of the disorder that reigned during the last years of the Colony: even though from the outside it still appeared like the center of operations of a powerful group of Spanish merchants, the city had become Americanized to a surprising extent—​not only had its population become overwhelmingly American, but power structures were now controlled by Americans to a large extent. Let us begin with the army. Since the mid-​eighteenth century, a trend began to Americanize the regiments stationed in Cartagena, contrary to the Crown’s

58  Cartagena de Indias good judgment. Increasingly, vacancies were filled resorting to the easy recourse of hiring local officers and soldiers. According to the historian Marchena, from 1800 to 1810, 80 percent of intermediate-​rank officers were natives of Cartagena, as well as almost all cadets and second lieutenants. Spaniards continued to hold almost all high ranks, although, as Marchena himself points out, most of them “had lived in Cartagena for many years and had developed innumerable family and personal interests.”69 At the beginning of the revolution, the highest-​ranking official in New Granada’s army, Field Marshal Antonio Narváez de la Torre, was Creole. Something similar happened to the powerful group of merchants. First, in 1810, most of the Spanish merchants of the Consulado de Comercio had lived at least twenty years in Cartagena, where they had raised their children, built prosperous businesses, and obtained honors in public life. Of course, it made no sense to continue to define them as mere temporary brokers in Cadiz’s commerce. Second, in the early nineteenth century, some of the most important merchants were Creole, and had a decisive influence on the actions of the Consulado de Comercio. Among them, José Ignacio de Pombo and Juan de Dios Amador were two of the most influential personalities in economic and political affairs in the final days of the Colony and the early days of the Republic. Third, a new generation of intellectuals, almost all of them children of Spanish merchants, monopolized modern knowledge in a port like Cartagena, which, in spite of its importance, had never had a university or anything like it.70 Most of them were lawyers who had graduated from universities in Santa Fe de Bogotá between 1780 and 1805, in the midst of the debates over the validity of the useful sciences and the new reflections on the social and economic state of the Colony. It is not surprising that, in that same period, the Consulado de Comercio engaged in a violent dispute with the Viceroy Amar y Borbón over a new printing press that the guild had purchased without prior authorization from the viceregal authorities and whose use had been categorically forbidden by those authorities with Madrid’s support.71 In 1809, the year when the political crisis blew up in Cartagena, a large number of the council’s members belonged to this new Creole generation. The formation of this group of enlightened Creoles is no doubt a phenomenon of the greatest importance due to its novelty and its impact on the political life of a city that had never stood out for its intellectual activity. The lack of educational institutions, newspapers, and publications of any sort, and of cultural activities in general, portray it as a port with an intense and disorderly life, indifferent to the letters, the sciences, and the arts. A Black and mulatto popular culture full of vitality and a minimal cultivation of intelligence on the part of the White elites characterized the cultural life of this famous trading post of enslaved people during most of the eighteenth century. However, after 1780, Cartagena became a center of a feverish intellectual activity. The young members of the new generation, graduates from law and theology schools in Santa Fe de Bogotá, received

Cartagena de Indias  59 newspapers from England, Spain, and the United States, read Adam Smith, and wrote dramas and scientific essays. They proposed creating a public university in Cartagena and intended to create math and drawing schools.72 The fact that this group of enlightened men were sons of Spanish parents, almost all of them merchants and members of the upper classes of peninsular Europeans in the city, is not an insignificant fact, for it explains to a large extent their character as representatives of a transitional era and, therefore, their contradictory attitude toward the upcoming changes. The field marshal and general commander of the armies of New Granada, Antonio de Narváez y la Torre, and the doctor in law and merchant José Ignacio de Pombo synthesize the new outlook and characteristics of the generation of Creole intellectuals in the early nineteenth century. Antonio de Narváez was born in Cartagena in 1753 of Spanish parents, both of them from the highest social echelons. He began his military career at a very early age and graduated as a military engineer, a profession in which he stood out as one of the most brilliant builders of fortifications. In his long life history at the king’s service, he occupied the most important positions of his trade, without facing any obstacles due to his Creole status. In 1770, he was appointed governor of the province of Santa Marta, and in 1781, he was honored with an even more important position as governor of the province of Panama. As a military man, he was one of the few Creoles to obtain the rank of field marshal, and the only one in the viceroyalty in 1809. In 1810, he was perhaps the most powerful man of New Granada as the general commander of the armies and elected representative of the Cortes of Cádiz.73 According to the Baron of Humboldt, José Ignacio de Pombo was the only important merchant of New Granada.74 He was the son of Esteban de Pombo, a Spanish aristocrat who became lieutenant to the king in the province of Popayán, and of Tomasa de Ante y Valencia, sister of the Count of Casa Valencia, general accountant of the empire in Madrid. A native of Popayán, he studied philosophy and law at Colegio del Rosario in Santa Fe de Bogotá and settled in Cartagena at the age of twenty-​three. In that city he founded the most powerful business firm of the time, established the first insurance company of the viceroyalty, and married María Josefa Amador, daughter of one of the wealthiest Spanish merchants living in the port. In his almost thirty years of residence in Cartagena, Pombo held all the important positions reserved to the members of his profession and the city’s elites: twice head of the Consulado de Comercio, mayor, royal sublieutenant, and prosecuting attorney.75 Narváez and Pombo were fifty-​six and forty-​eight years old respectively in 1809. Their lives, of which we have presented a succinct summary, appear to disprove the accusation commonly made against the Bourbons of discriminating against the Creoles of New Granada. Any average Spaniard would have been happy with much less than what was achieved by these two patricians in the colonial possessions in Spanish America. However, Narváez and Pombo initiated

60  Cartagena de Indias the criticism against the colonial regime in the Colombian Caribbean. In their writings, they demonstrate an ample knowledge of the economy of their time and a profound discontent with the state of dejection of the viceroyalty, but especially of the Caribbean provinces. In their lives and writings, they both incarnated the contradictions that characterized men of their time, their place, and their social standing. In their essays, for the first time in the eighteenth century, they argue for the need to modernize agricultural production, to deregulate commerce, and to stimulate the development of productive forces by incorporating scientific and technological innovations. Pombo even proposed creating a society of small free producers to replace slavery, as the best means to foster agricultural production. Both were ardent advocates of free trade, to the point that Narváez elaborated a free trade proposal for the colony in 1778.76 But not everything about these two enlightened Creoles was modernity and progress. In addition, there was a profoundly aristocratic psychology anchored in the past, with very deep roots in the traditions of Spain’s nobility. Not for nothing was Antonio de Narváez the grandson of the Count of Santa Cruz, and José Ignacio de Pombo the nephew of the Count of Casa Valencia. Even though Pombo sufficiently cited Adam Smith and the Spanish reformers Campillo, Campomanes, and Jovellanos to support his arguments, and even though he was the first New Granadan intellectual to systematically propose a plan of liberal reforms to dismantle the colonial edifice, he also implored the Crown to grant him a Castilian title, preferably that of Count of Pombo, which he was apparently denied.77 The last letter written by Narváez during his life was sent to the viceroy Benito Pérez, who was exiled in Panama. In it, this most powerful man, aged almost sixty, whose intervention had been decisive for the Creoles’ victory, attempted to convince the viceroy that his participation in the Cartagena rebellion had been for the benefit of the Spanish and that his love for Spain and the king continued unaltered.78 This despite the fact that the revolution was at its best moment at the time. Something similar happened with their Americanness. It is not a matter of questioning their sincerity, but of highlighting their profoundly elitist and locally centered position. At the end of their lives, their opposition to Spain’s colonial economic policies and their desire to contribute to the colony’s progress led them to risk everything. Without their decisive participation, Cartagena de Indias might have taken the same route as the other coastal provinces and might have defended the king’s cause. Their dreams of modernization were centered on the provinces of the Colombian Caribbean, about which they wrote extraordinary pages, describing in the minutest detail their geography, their productions, and their infinite development potential. Pombo and Narváez sacrificed everything for the progress of the Colombian Caribbean, but at the same time felt the deepest contempt, mixed with a great deal of fear, for the mass of free and enslaved Black people that constituted one of the columns of its population. For Pombo, Black people were inferior

Cartagena de Indias  61 beings, capable of terrible acts of violence—​the thought of Haiti terrified him—​ and this was one of the reasons why he advocated so vehemently for the abolition of slavery and the prompt enactment of a migration policy that ensured the “civilized influx” of northern Europeans. One century before Sarmiento and Alberdi, the enlightened New Granadans led by Pombo and Caldas had clearly described the conflict between “civilization” and “barbarism.”79 For Narváez, Black people were nothing more than meat that could be traded for cattle.80 In 1809, the enlightened Creoles of Cartagena de Indias finally attempted to take control over the fate of their city and province, without ceasing to belong to the “mother country,” with the unanimous participation of all other social sectors, including the great Spanish merchants. Such a drastic decision was made at a moment when Cartagena was at a sort of impasse. Legal commerce had all but disappeared, buried by ten almost continuous years of Spanish imperial wars; the sugarcane haciendas, instead of reflecting the general productive growth of the Caribbean islands, had contracted, victims of a disastrous fiscal policy; the inevitable contraband had become the most fruitful and generalized economic activity in the Caribbean coast; and the city was full idle people. The environment of economic productivity and social discipline sought by the Creoles to carry out their ideal of progress was met with all sorts of obstacles in the city. In their attempt to gain control over the economic and political life of the province, the Creole and Spanish elites raised their conflict with the central authorities to extreme levels, to the point of losing control of the situation. The history of this conflict, contrary to what has been traditionally written, did not begin with the political crisis of the early nineteenth century. Its economic and political roots are found in the long Bourbon period of the eighteenth century. Notes 1 Juan Manuel Pacheco, Los jesuitas en Colombia, vol. I (Bogotá, Editorial Kelly, 1969), p. 275. 2 The best works on Cartagena’s role as a military stronghold are: Juan Marchena Fernández, La institución militar en Cartagena de Indias en el siglo XVIII (Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos, 1984), and Allan J. Kuethe, Military Reform and Society in New Granada, 1773–​1808 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1978). See also, Manuel Zapatero, Las fortificaciones de Cartagena de Indias (Madrid, 1968). On its role as a port of arrival of enslaved people, see Jorge Palacios Preciado, La trata de negros por Cartagena de Indias (Tunja: Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica de Colombia, 1973), and Enriqueta Vila Vilar, Hispanoamérica y el comercio de esclavos. Los asientos portugueses (Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos, 1977). On the fleet system, see the classical work by C. H. Haring, Trade and Navigation between Spain and the Indies in the Time of the Hapsburgs (Gloucester, Massachusetts: P. Smith, 1964) and Nicolás del Castillo Mathieu, La llave de las Indias (Bogotá: Ediciones el Tiempo, 1981).

62  Cartagena de Indias 3 The work by the Jesuit priest Alonso de Sandoval, De Instauranda Aethiopum Salute (Bogotá, 1956), is the best document found to this date on the trade of enslaved people in seventeenth-​century Cartagena. His description of the living conditions of enslaved people in Cartagena is unequaled. On the other hand, Nicolás del Castillo Mathieu organized very useful statistical information on the approximate number of enslaved people who entered Cartagena in the different periods of the trade. See Castillo Mathieu, La llave de las Indias. 4 José Toribio Medina, La imprenta en Bogotá y la Inquisición en Cartagena de Indias (Bogotá: Editorial A. B. C., 1952), pp. 87–​120. 5 The voyagers Juan and Ulloa witnessed the last “small galleon fair” in Cartagena and wrote a splendid description of it. See Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, Voyage to South America, trans. John Adams, abridged ed. (New York, 1964), pp. 79–​82. 6 Eduardo Lemaire, Historia general de Cartagena de Indias, vol. I (Bogotá: Banco de la República, 1983), p. 60. 7 For a detailed study of Pointis’s attack on Cartagena, see Enrique de la Matta Rodríguez, El asalto de Pointis a Cartagena de Indias (Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos, 1979). 8 Castillo Mathieu, La llave de las Indias, pp. 127–​282; Diego de Peredo, “Noticia historial de Cartagena, año de 1772,” Boletín historial, 34 (Cartagena: Academia de Historia de Cartagena, 1940), 456. 9 Juan and Ulloa, A Voyage to South America, p. 22. 10 Castillo Mathieu, La llave de las Indias, p. 26. 11 Juan and Ulloa, A Voyage to South America, pp. 19–​84. 12 Ibid., p. 31. 13 Ibid., p. 30. 14 See Manuel Tejado Fernández, Aspectos de la vida social de Cartagena de indias en el seiscientos (Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos, 1954). 15 Juan and Ulloa, A Voyage to South America, p. 29. 16 See “Expediente sobre la formación de un tribunal de comercio en Cartagena, 1757,” in AGI: Consulado, legajo 798. 17 On the Caroline military reform in Cartagena, see Kuethe, Military Reform and Society; on the commercial reform, see Anthony McFarlane, Colombia before Independence: Economy, Society and Politics under Bourbon Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 126–​163. 18 Marchena, La institución militar, pp. 96–​98. 19 Ibid., pp. 98–​121. 20 Ibid., pp. 167–​170. 21 Enrique Cabellos Barreiro, Cartagena de Indias. Mágica acrópolis de América (Madrid: Colegio de Ingenieros de Caminos, Canales y Puertos, 1991), p. 204. 22 Antonio Arévalo, “Proyecto de cerrar la abertura de Bocagrande del puerto de Cartagena de Indias,” in Antonio Cuervo, Colección de documentos inéditos sobre la historia de Colombia, vol. II (Bogotá, Imprenta de J. J. Pérez, 1892), p. 247. 23 Cabellos Barreiro, Cartagena de Indias, p. 200. 24 Ibid., p. 191. 25 Ibid., p. 220. 26 Miklos Pogonyi, “The Search for Trade and Profit in Bourbon Colombia, 1767–​1777” (PhD diss., University of New Mexico, 1978), pp. 142–​146.

Cartagena de Indias  63 27 “Cuadro revolucionario y estado actual de la provincia de Cartagena,” Gaceta del Gobierno de Cartagena de Indias, September 14, 1816, in Biblioteca Bartolomé Calvo, Cartagena: sección microfilm, prensa cartagenera. 28 See John Phelan, The People and the King: The Comunero Revolution in Colombia, 1781 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), pp. 145–​ 146. Kuethe, “Flexibilidad racial en las milicias disciplinadas de Cartagena de Indias,” in Historia y Cultura, 2 (Cartagena: Facultad de Ciencias Humanas–​Universidad de Cartagena, 1994), pp. 177–​191. 29 Pogonyi, “The Search for Trade,” p. 142. 30 Marchena, La institución militar, pp. 144–​188. 31 Kuethe, Military Reform, pp. 30–​38. 32 Expediente sobre la formación de un tribunal de comercio en Cartagena, 1757, AGI; Consulado, legajo 798. 33 Expediente sobre la formación de un tribunal de comercio en Cartagena, 1775, AGI: Consulado, legajo 798. Relación de préstamos de comerciantes de Cartagena, 1782, AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 955. Censo de Cartagena, 1778. 34 José I. de Pombo, “Memorias sobre el contrabando,” 1804, AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 960; René de la Pedraja Tomán, “Aspectos del comercio de Cartagena en el siglo XVIII,” in Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura 8 (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional, 1976), pp. 107–​125; A. McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, pp. 21–​ 163; Jacques Barbier, “Commercial Reform and Comercio Neutral in Cartagena de Indias, 1788–​1808,” in Reform and Insurrection in Bourbon New Granada and Peru, ed. John Fisher, Allan Kuethe, and Anthony McFarlane (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), pp. 96–​120; Alfonso Múnera, “Merchants in Transition: The Cartagena Consulado and the Problem of Regionalism, 1750–​1815” (MA thesis, University of Connecticut, 1989). 35 Juan and Ulloa, A Voyage to South America, p. 29. 36 Expediente sobre la formación de un tribunal de comercio en Cartagena, 1775, AGI: Consulado, legajo 798. 37 In 1790, the following merchants were part of Cartagena’s council as aldermen: José Izquierdo, Manuel José Vega, Juan J. Goenaga, Gregorio Gómez, Manuel Faustino de Mier, and Matías Rodríguez Torices. The ordinary mayors were: Juan Francisco Martín and José Antonio Valdés. The public prosecutor was José I. de Pombo. Juan Fernández de Moure and Salvador Gaviria were the commanders of the White and Pardo militias, respectively. 38 Petición de Juan de Francisco Martín para que le sea concedida una distinción nobiliaria, 1805, AGI. Santa Fe, legajo 959; Petición de Joseph Antonio Valdés para que se le excluya del consulado de comercio, AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 957. 39 Marchena, La institución militar, pp. 268–​271. 40 Enrique Marco Dorta, “Ganadería y abastecimiento en Cartagena de Indias, 1766,” Homenaje a don Ciriaco Pérez Bustamante vol. II (Madrid, 1970); Orlando Fals Borda, Mompox y Loba, pp. 187–​225; Hermes Tovar, Grandes empresas (Bogotá, 1982), pp. 93–​131; Adolfo Meisel, Esclavitud, pp. 255–​262. 41 By the second half of the eighteenth century, two of the wealthiest people in Cartagena were widows of merchants: Paulina Gómez and the Marquise of Valdehoyos. See Expediente sobre la formación de un tribunal de comercio, 1775, and the 1778 census of Cartagena.

64  Cartagena de Indias 42 Roberto Arrázola, Secretos de la historia de Cartagena (Cartagena: Ediciones del Concejo Municipal, 1967), pp. 156–​164. 43 See Lista de artesanos que comprende el Padrón general del barrio de Santa Catalina, 1780, in AGN: Sección colonia, Miscelánea, t. 6, fs. 615–​619. 44 Censo general de Cartagena, 1778. 45 Censo de artesanos de los barrios de Santa Catalina, Santo Toribio, Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes y San Sebastián, 1780; in AGN: Colonia, Miscelánea, t. 6, fs. 599–​619; t. 31, fs. 148–​154, 259–​261, 1014–​1015v. 46 Ibid. 47 Posada Gutiérrez, Joaquín. Memorias Histórico-​Políticas. Vol. III. Bogotá: Biblioteca Popular de Cultura Colombiana, 1951. pp. 82–​100 (Primera edición: 1865). 48 There is already a solid historical literature on the role of free mulattos in Latin American and Caribbean colonial societies. See especially David W. Cohen and Jack P. Greene, eds. Neither Slave nor Free. The Freedman of African Descent in the Slave Societies of the New World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972); George Reid Andrews, The Afro-​ Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800–​ 1900 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980), esp. pp. 42–​63; Michel-​Rolph Trouillot, “The Inconvenience of Freedom: Free People of Color and the Political Aftermath of Slavery in Dominica and Saint-​Dominique/​Haiti,” in The Meaning of Freedom. Economics, Politics, and Culture after Slavery, ed. Frank McGlynn and Seymour Drescher (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), pp. 147–​182, and “Motion in the System: Coffee, Color, and Slavery in Eighteenth-​Century Saint-​ Dominique,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center), 3 (Winter 1982): 331–​388. 49 Juan and Ulloa, A Voyage to South America, pp. 29–​41. 50 In 1778, all of Cartagena’s carpenters who worked building homes and churches were mulattos. See Censo de carpinteros de Cartagena, 1778, in AGN, Miscelánea. For more details, see Arrázola, Secretos de la historia, pp. 70–​75. 51 Censo general de Cartagena, 1778. 52 Kuethe, Military Reform, pp. 38–​47. 53 Censo general de Cartagena, 1778. 54 Petición de Cristóbal Polo para que se le permita ejercer la profesión de abogado, Cartagena, 1765, AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 760. 55 Ibid. 56 Arrázola, Secretos de la historia, pp. 67–​69. 57 Joaquín Pimienta al rey sobre arreglo de calles, Cartagena, 1790, AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 955. 58 Cited in Guy Bensunan, “Cartagena’s Fandango Politics,” Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, 3 (1984): 128. 59 Obispo Joseph Díaz al rey, in AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 1044. Cited in Guy Bensusan, “Cartagena’s Fandango Politics,” Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 3 (1984): 133. 60 Arrázola, Secretos de la historia, pp. 156–​164. 61 Richard Konestzke, Colección de documentos para la historia de la formación social de Hispanoamérica, 1493–​1810, vol. II (Madrid, 1858), pp. 587–​590. 62 Roberto Arrázola, Palenque, primer pueblo libre de América (Cartagena, 1970), pp. 93–​266.

Cartagena de Indias  65 63 Virrey Pedro Mendinueta a Francisco Saavedra, Santa Fe, May 19 and July 19, 1799, AGI: Estado, legajo 52. 64 Virrey Ezpeleta a comerciantes de Cartagena, in AGN: Comercio, fs. 23–​25. 65 José I. de Pombo, “Informe sobre contrabando,” Cartagena, 1804, AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 960. 66 Ibid. 67 AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 961. 68 Castillo Mathieu, La llave de las Indias, p. 229. 69 Marchena, Juan. The Social World of the Military in Perú and Nueva Granada. The Colonial Oligarchies in Conflict, 1750–​1810, in Reform and Insurrection in Bourbon New Granada and Peru, p. 85. 70 In 1809, among the Creole intellectuals who were children of merchants, were Juan de Dios Amador, Manuel Rodríguez Torices, Manuel Benito Revollo, Antonio Ayos, and Juan García del Río. 71 José Toribio Medina, La imprenta en Cartagena de Indias, 1809–​1820 (Santiago de Chile, 1904), pp. 19–​49. 72 José Ignacio de Pombo and José M. García de Toledo received magazines and newspapers from the United States, Spain, Jamaica, and Cuba. The Consulado de Comercio of Cartagena proposed the creation of math and drawing schools. See José I. de Pombo, “Informe a la Junta Suprema de Cartagena, 1809,” AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 960, and “Expediente sobre el proyecto de Pombo de establecer escuelas en el Consulado de Comercio de Cartagena,” 1809, AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 961. See also Cartas de García de Toledo a Joaquín Camacho, in Semblanza del prócer y mártir José M. García de Toledo, ed. Mario León Echevarría (Cartagena, 1976), pp. 91–​109. 73 “Relación de méritos de Antonio de Narváez y la Torre,” AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 1019. 74 Donaldo Bossa Herazo, Cartagena independiente: tradición y desarrollo (Bogotá, Tercer Mundo Editores, 1967), pp. 47–​48. 75 “Relación de méritos de José I. de Pombo,” AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 961. 76 José I. de Pombo, “Informe del Real Consulado de Cartagena de Indias a la suprema junta provincial de la misma, 1810,” and Antonio Narváez, “Informe sobre la provincia de Santa Marta y Riohacha, 1778,” in Escritos de dos economistas coloniales, ed. Sergio Ortiz (Bogotá: Banco de la República, 1965), pp. 17–​61 and 121–​271. 77 José I. de Pombo al rey, Cartagena, January 30, 1795, AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 961. 78 Antonio de Narváez a Benito Pérez, Cartagena, 1812, in Documentos para la historia de la Nueva Granada, ed. José Manuel Restrepo (Bogotá, 1941), pp. 23–​24. See also “Narváez, al secretario de Estado del Despacho Universal de las Indias,” January 27 and February 7, 1811, in Restrepo, Documentos importantes de la Nueva Granada, Venezuela y Colombia, vol. I (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional, 1969). 79 Pombo, “Memorias sobre el contrabando,” 1804; Caldas, “Influencia del clima sobre los seres organizados.” 80 Narváez, “Informe sobre la provincia,” p. 53.

4 Economic implications of the conflict between Cartagena and Santa Fe de Bogotá

I The development of a community of large merchants in the second half of the eighteenth century, which, in spite of the peninsular origin of most of its members, was integrated into the spiritual and material life of the port of Cartagena as never before, led to very significant transformations in that elite’s traditional behavior. At the end of 1780, those merchants had a very different attitude toward local problems than their predecessors in the first half of the century. They believed that they could actively intervene in the progress of the province and design it at will, and, as a result, unsolvable contradictions arose with the metropolis, especially with the large commercial firms in Cadiz, and more importantly, a conflict with profound repercussions developed with the viceregal authorities and Santa Fe’s elites. Their common economic interests and the sense of community among them, strengthened by marriage alliances, predisposed them to seek new forms of organization that would allow them to structure a vision of development toward the Caribbean Ocean. The result was the creation of Cartagena’s Consulado de Comercio.1 It is worth taking some time to illustrate the significance of this body. My intention is to demonstrate that the Consulado de Comercio was a political instrument employed by Cartagena’s commercial bourgeoisie to deploy a regional response to the colony’s profound crisis. Moreover, the Consulado was not, nor could it have been, a body of some peninsular merchants at the service of the interests of Cadiz, and that José Ignacio de Pombo was not an exception, but, on the contrary, its highest representative and ideologue during its existence.2 Interpreting the conflicts between Cartagena’s and Santa Fe’s elites largely depends on understanding the role played by the Consulado de Comercio. II In 1789, the merchants’ representatives José Ignacio de Pombo and Lázaro M. de Herrera, both of them enlightened merchants, addressed the Crown with DOI: 10.4324/9781003381198-5

Conflict between Cartagena and Santa Fe de Bogotá  67 a lengthy petition requesting the establishment of the Consulado de Comercio in Cartagena.3 The positive environment created by Charles III’s economic reforms made this sort of petition viable. In only two years (1785–​1786), four minor Consulados had emerged in Spain and several of its most important ports had requested the same privilege. The most evident characteristic of these Consulados in the late eighteenth century was that, since their establishment, they were key tools to foster a modern economic development. They were not conceived as the old medieval guilds,4 and this characteristic was perhaps more evident in Cartagena than elsewhere because the city had had a commercial court for three decades.5 In their petition to the Crown, the representatives of Cartagena’s commerce emphasized the progressive objectives of their requests and argued that in spite of the establishment of a trade board in 1760, composed of the governor and two other members, it has only dealt with judicial matters and merchant wills, but has not sought the expansion of trade, has not issued regulations for commercial affairs, has not promoted agriculture or other products that, due to inactivity, have been left aside, and the areas of agriculture and commerce could be quite valuable if the holders of such trades were encouraged through incentives to work in those areas.6 In addition, in a letter sent to the Crown supporting the Cartagenan merchants’ petition, the viceroy Gil Lemos said that the Consulado emerged as a “patriotic body for the promotion of agriculture, mining, industry, and other important ends, which will surely bring opulence and prosperity to this kingdom.”7 It is worth mentioning two aspects that helped characterize the recently founded organ. First, the representatives of commerce avoided mentioning the division between Spain’s commerce and the country’s commerce. The only classification of merchants proposed was related to its members’ economic power. According to this classification, only comerciantes (merchants), navieros (ship owners), and mercaderes (traders) with a certain income could be part of the Consulado’s board of directors. Their origin or their links to the Cadiz guild were no longer relevant. Thus, comerciantes should have an annual business capital above 15,000 pesos; the mercaderes, above 10,000 pesos; and navieiros had to demonstrate that they owned a ship worth more than 10,000 pesos and able to sail the route to Cadiz. Second, for Cartagena’s merchants, the Consulado concerned only themselves. They do not seem to have considered the possibility of including landowners in it.8 In 1790, the Council of the Indies responded favorably to the petition to create the Consulado of Cartagena and even determined which merchants would integrate its first board of directors. However, it was only in 1795 that the king signed the royal decree authorizing the establishment of a Consulado whose jurisdiction included the entire territory of New Granada except for Quito and

68  Conflict between Cartagena and Santa Fe de Bogotá Popayán. The decree containing the fifty-​two rules for the Consulado was, with some minor changes, a faithful reproduction of the one that created the Consulado of Veracruz a few years earlier; in general terms, it was also very similar to those of Havana and Caracas. In all cases, the internal structures of the court of commerce and the board of directors were intended to achieve the same goals. But the rules regarding who should belong to the board were different, since they reflected the balance of power of each city’s social elite. While in Havana and Caracas, landowners and merchants composed the board of directors in equal numbers, the Crown did not name a single landowner as member of Cartagena’s board,9 and only after 1800 did Creole landowners begin to play an important role. Article 22 of the 1795 royal decree summarized the board’s main objectives in the context of the new spirit of progress that inspired the Consulados de Comercio in the late eighteenth century. It reads as follows: The protection and promotion of commerce will be this board’s main responsibility, and it will comply with it by seeking by all means possible the advancement of agriculture, improving crops and fruit processing, introducing the most advantageous machinery and tools, facilitating local circulation, and in sum promoting anything that may contribute to increase and extend all branches of farming and trade; to which end it shall frequently assess the state of those branches in all of its districts by means of its representatives or other people or bodies with which it shall correspond to that end.10 This article was the basis for the conflict between the merchants from the provinces in the interior and Cartagena’s Consulado de Comercio. In 1804, the merchants from Socorro, Pamplona, Tunja, San Gil, Purificación, and Timaná expressed their desire to detach themselves from Cartagena’s Consulado and to join a new one to be created with headquarters in Santa Fe. Among other reasons expressed to that end, their main one was the noncompliance by Cartagenan merchants with Article 22, in particular, that the port’s merchants had done nothing to develop communications between the coast and the interior.11 The most recent historiography has echoed Andean merchants’ arguments, maintaining that Cartagena’s Consulado opposed New Granada’s progress because its members were Spaniards. In actual fact, this thesis reveals a serious inconsistency in the manner in which Colombia’s colonial history is studied. On the one hand, it admits that in the eighteenth century New Granada was composed of autonomous regions without much contact between them; on the other hand, when discussing its history, the regional perspective disappears and is replaced by the image of a unified New Granada, with a single set of interests and even a single notion of what its progress meant.12 Cartagena’s Consulado, as I shall attempt to explain below, could only express the regional interests of the most powerful sector of the commercial

Conflict between Cartagena and Santa Fe de Bogotá  69 bourgeoisie of the Colombian Caribbean, which conflicted with those of the commercial and landowning elites of the Andes. Differently from Havana’s Consulado—​a difference that has nothing to do with good or bad intentions, but with the economic realities of each city—​that of Cartagena made no significant concrete contributions to the material progress even of the Caribbean region. Its historical importance resides in the realm of ideas and politics. The Consulado served as a means to express the best-​structured liberal reformist thought in the Colony, while also becoming one of the key bodies in the struggle for the political autonomy of the Colombian Caribbean in the early nineteenth century. Its known reports, most of them written by José Ignacio de Pombo, are among the most clear-​sighted points of departure for nineteenth-​century criticism of the colonial regime. It makes little sense to claim that those reports were Pombo’s exceptional work, since, as I have said, all of them were elaborated as documents issued by the Consulado, signed by its directors without any known opposition by any of them. José Ignacio de Pombo was the intellectual who best expressed the interests of the large Spanish merchants established in Cartagena and of the Creole elite in general, at a moment of profound crisis. He was particularly well endowed to play this apparently contradictory role. In addition to being one of the most brilliant Creoles of late eighteenth-​century Spanish America, he was the most powerful New Granadan merchant of his time. In addition to being a Creole, he belonged to a highly aristocratic lineage and was a close relative to a very powerful high government official in Madrid. Finally, his wife was the daughter of one of the oldest and most powerful Spanish merchants in the province of Cartagena.13 Throughout almost its entire existence, from its foundation to the beginning of the revolution, Cartagena’s Consulado de Comercio was controlled by three powerful families: Pombo-​Amador-​Arrázola-​Lecuna, Martín-​Martínez Aparicio, and Espriella-​González. However, in spite of the conflicts between them, there was never opposition within the corporation, even when Pombo confronted the viceroy over the purchase of a printing press, with clearly reformist intentions. On the contrary, the abundant correspondence produced by this conflict clearly reveals not only the Consulado’s liberal reformist orientation but, more importantly, the distrust that the viceregal authorities and the Court in Madrid were beginning to feel toward it. The viceroy’s uncompromising decision to forbid the printing press’s operation and the Consulado’s determination to defend its right to use it to foster knowledge and the sciences, in a process that lasted several years, clearly demonstrate that the Consulado was far from being an institution of ignorant and reactionary Iberians.14 In addition, it is important to know that, during its brief existence, the Consulado counted with the participation of Creole intellectuals, who must have been decisive in formulating its opinions. Frontline leaders of the political struggle that erupted in 1809 were active members of that body, such as Juan de

70  Conflict between Cartagena and Santa Fe de Bogotá Dios Amador, lawyer and future president of the Republic of Cartagena in 1815; José María García de Toledo, lawyer and landowner and first president of the Supreme Governing Junta of Cartagena, and Manuel Eusebio Canabal, lawyer and landowner and one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence.15 The consulate split up at the beginning of 1811, when political contradictions worsened during the transition from the struggle for autonomy to the struggle for absolute independence from Spain. At that moment, many of the old Spanish merchants opted for exile, while others, like the Creoles, declared allegiance to the new republic. I shall discuss this matter in detail further in this work. For now, let us see how the Consulado experienced this history from the unsurpassable perspective of the conflict with Santa Fe. III Since before its creation in 1795, Santa Fe’s merchants vehemently opposed Cartagena’s Consulado de Comercio and never ceased attacking it.16 As late as 1806, they were still struggling to obtain their own Consulado,17 and in the final years of the colonial period, few events reflected the regional conflict like this struggle for commercial hegemony. The rivalry between Cartagena and Santa Fe merchants turned into an open war during the Independence movement, but one of its most important causes can no doubt be found decades earlier, in the conflictive modernization and growth projects that each of these two groups determined for itself. In 1796, Santa Fe had sixty-​five large merchants, thirty-​two of whom negotiated directly with Spain, controlled most of the trade with the interior, and had a significant economic and political influence in that very populated area.18 The king’s decision to establish a Consulado in Cartagena harmed them deeply. Santa Fe’s elite had the viceroys’ support in its attempt to become independent from the merchants of the Coast,19 and on July 19, 1796, through Viceroy Mendinueta, it presented to the Court a forceful proposal that demanded the establishment of its own Consulado. This document deserves careful analysis, since in its pages the capital’s guild attempted to prove how profoundly their economic and social interests were at odds with those of Cartagena. The merchants of the interior characterized the conflict as the result of two opposing viewpoints on the viceroyalty’s development. For them, the poor state of the roads in the interior was the main reason why they could not compete with foreign goods in the coastal markets. As a result, one of its main concerns was the construction of the Opón road, commissioned by the king to Cartagena’s Consulado and intended to overcome the nightmare that traveling from Bogotá to the Caribbean port implied. According to the Andes merchants, the Consulado was unable to advance with the construction because “it is located in a corner of the kingdom from where the problems and needs of the vast provinces of the interior cannot be understood,” and they added:

Conflict between Cartagena and Santa Fe de Bogotá  71 The Consulado will have no major interest in the development of the provinces in the interior for reasons we shall not discuss, but will disclose only if requested to do so; for now, it suffices to insinuate that commercial interests in the interior and those of the coast are not the same, and in many cases can be opposed. Wheat flour should give you some idea of this type of paradox.20 Thus, economic interests were at the core of sectional conflicts in New Granada. While some historians have naively characterized this rivalry as a struggle between the progressive merchants of the Andean interior and a reactionary monopoly established in Cartagena,21 the fact is that it must be understood as the final phase of a struggle for economic hegemony between the two most powerful groups of large merchants and between the two most important cities in New Granada. Santa Fe’s merchants controlled the internal trade in the most populated area of the kingdom, and at least thirty-​two of them traded directly with Spain in the late eighteenth century. On the other hand, Cartagena’s Consulado, by being appointed by the king as the promoter of roads in the interior and of the economic development of New Granada, inevitably became the center of the controversy with Santa Fe’s merchants and landowners. The terrible state of inland roadways and the local wheat flour crisis were two sides of the same tragedy. A central aspect of the history of New Granada in the eighteenth century can be summarized as a double failure: that of the construction of an adequate road system, and that of the attempts to turn wheat flour into the basis of the viceroyalty’s agricultural development. In 1796, Santa Fe, supported by the other inland provinces, blamed the Consulado of Cartagena for those failures, and accused it of indifference regarding the improvement of inland roads and of a negative attitude toward wheat flour from the interior. When referring to the flour dilemma, the historian Miklos Pogonyi painted a different landscape. According to Pogonyi, even if the roads had been in better condition, “flour from Vélez would have still been inadequate, expensive, and of poor quality.” The Opón road, whose improvement was established in the Consulado’s founding documents as one of its main objectives, had clearly proved to be a failure as a means to transport local grains to the cities on the coast and had been abandoned twenty years earlier. Pogonyi concludes, “It was proven that it was easier to import fresher flour from overseas, from thousands of miles away, than from a fraction of that distance in the interior.”22 To the above we could add that, in the late nineteenth century, Colombia had still not been able to develop a decent road system, and that the country was still attempting to build the Opón road, with the same feeling of frustration that the Spanish Crown had experienced when it attempted it in 1795.23

72  Conflict between Cartagena and Santa Fe de Bogotá IV On the eve of the struggle for independence, Cartagena’s Consulado sent Madrid an extensive and detailed report of its conflict with Santa Fe regarding the construction of inland roads. This report is no doubt the best document discovered to this day to study this crucial topic of the history of New Granada.24 The conflict surrounding the roads developed as follows. In 1798, only three years after its foundation, the Consulado decided to support a project to build a road from the Opón River to Santa Fe. The cost of the work was estimated at 10,000 pesos. The Consulado offered to contribute with 2,000–​1,000 in silver and 1,000 in tools. In 1801, Manuel Villarroel, mayor of Zipaquirá, requested the Consulado’s support to build another road, from Otro Mundo to Santa Fe. Less expensive than the former, it would only cost 6,000 pesos. The Consulado decided to support it, offering once again 2,000 pesos. In 1802, Father Pedro Pardo, priest of Puente Real, presented a third project to the Consulado, to build a road from the Carare River to Santa Fe. This one was much more expensive than the two previous projects, estimated at 25,000 pesos. Cartagena’s refusal to support Father Pardo’s project led to a bitter debate between the Consulado and Viceroy Mendinueta. The latter, who had rejected the two previous projects and offered his entire support to that of Father Pardo, ordered the Carare project financed in all its stages. The Consulado, however, considered the first two road projects a much better choice, since they would cost less, would be shorter, and would traverse a more propitious landscape than that of Father Pardo. Finally, it argued that it had already committed its capital in an agreement with Cartagena’s council to pay 80 percent of the works required to open the Canal del Dique, estimated at 100,000 pesos, adding that war had considerably reduced its revenues and that it was therefore very short of resources.25 In May 1803, Viceroy Mendinueta went on the offensive, notifying the Consulado of his firm decision to authorize the construction of the Carare road and demanding a detailed report on the state of its accounts. Three months later, the Consulado replied with a new proposal—​to employ its meager funds to undertake a serious and scientific study of the three road projects, before deciding on the best option. This was an unprecedented proposal in New Granada, since the concessions to build roads had been traditionally granted as personal rewards, without major technical assessments.26 It is likely that the proposal’s intention was merely to prevent the viceroy from getting his way. Mendinueta’s response came two years later, on August 9, 1805. In his letter, he acknowledged the need for a technical study of the three projects, but at the same time he insisted that the Consulado should seek someone capable of carrying it out, since the military engineers were forbidden to perform public works by a royal decree. The Consulado appointed Francisco José de Caldas, a distinguished man of science and an important member of the Botanical Expedition of the sage Mutis, who was in charge of the Astronomical Observatory, but the viceroy

Conflict between Cartagena and Santa Fe de Bogotá  73 suspended Caldas’s work arguing that it was first necessary to elaborate certain documents. The next step in this bureaucratic conflict was double. On the one hand, Mendinueta obtained Madrid’s support for the Carare project through a royal decree dated August 1806. On the other hand, armed with this support, he requested the Consulado to provide the thousands of pesos that were presumably destined to the Canal del Dique, reminding it that its main responsibility was to build the Carare road. By this time, Father Pardo had raised the cost of building his road from 25,000 to 100,000 pesos. The Consulado refused to send a single cent to the viceroy, arguing that not only did it not have the money, but it was also indebted with some merchants. Evidently annoyed, Mendinueta made a radical decision and demanded that “the general accounts with [the Consulado’s] revenues and expenditures since it was established be presented […] and that all extraordinary expenses for public works be suspended.”27 Nothing had been accomplished two years later, in 1808, when the Consulado sent its report to the Crown. By then, five different projects to build a road from the eastern bank of the Magdalena River to Santa Fe had been presented to the viceroy and the Consulado. The kingdom’s poverty, the rivalry between the capital and Cartagena, and the complete lack of scientific criteria to develop a communications infrastructure hindered any effort to rationalize investments in roads. It could be argued in favor of the Consulado that it was the first economic institution of New Granada that attempted to apply the new scientific notions to the development of a modern communications infrastructure. Furthermore, although it failed in the attempt, it makes little sense to blame it for the failure, since after Independence and throughout the nineteenth century, many attempts to modernize the road system also failed.28 The Consulado’s failure in resolving the extremely serious problem of the poor state of internal communications was not because it was dominated by a selfish group of Spanish merchants opposed to progress, but because other material factors made the project unfeasible. Let us examine a few elements that allow us to assert this. First, the development of internal communication routes in colonies such as Caracas and Cuba in the late eighteenth century was the result of a significant growth of their foreign trade and a key factor of their growth.29 In addition, those colonies did not have to face the serious obstacle of a fragmented topography, difficult to overcome with the technology available at the time. Second, at the same time as some of the Caribbean colonies underwent a strong export development, New Granada experienced the opposite economic cycle. Not only was it unable to expand its foreign trade significantly, but its most consolidated agricultural undertakings, such as the sugarcane haciendas, had shrunk significantly. Third, the viceroyalty’s extremely rugged terrain was such a serious obstacle that New Granada earned a reputation for having the worst roads in all of Spanish America.30 Fourth, in spite of the Consulado’s intentions, the fifteen years that preceded the Independence

74  Conflict between Cartagena and Santa Fe de Bogotá movement were a period of depression of the legal trade. For that reason, the Consulado’s revenues were so small and its poverty was often so great that it was unable to conclude even smaller projects. Finally, in addition to these material factors, the acute regional conflict expressed in the clash between the central government and the Santa Fe elite, on the one hand, and Cartagena’s merchant community, on the other, was a major obstacle to accomplishing any significant project. V The dispute over inland roads, which prevailed during the Consulado’s entire existence, was in turn the consequence of an even deeper economic rivalry between the commercial elites of both cities and the regions under their influence. While Santa Fe and the other inland provinces saw Cartagena as the most important market for their agricultural products, especially flour, Cartagena, located on the Caribbean coast and accustomed to supplying itself through its foreign trade, attempted to establish a more open and free trade with the nearby colonies and the United States. Wheat flour was at the heart of this regional dispute, and it remained so throughout the eighteenth century, especially after 1760. The viceroyalty’s flour was mainly produced in the Andean districts of Vélez and Tunja, whose economic center was Santa Fe de Bogotá. However, in spite of its obvious political power, the capital failed to turn Cartagena into a market for such an important product, and, according to a US historian, from 1714 to 1769, foreign flour made up 95 percent of the port’s flour consumption.31 It was especially in the second half of the century when the viceroys and Santa Fe’s merchants attempted by all means to turn Cartagena into a market for Andean flour. In 1758, Viceroy Solís aimed all his efforts at reopening the Opón road as a means to cheapen the price of local flour in the port and make it competitive with foreign flour, going so far as to grant Blas de la Terga, an entrepreneur from Vélez, the monopoly of the grain market in Cartagena in order to reactivate flour transport through the Opón road. However, Terga was unable to lower the price of flour to less than twenty-​two pesos per load, while Cartagena merchants obtained better foreign flour for only twelve pesos, and therefore Cartagena continued purchasing flour from overseas.32 Two other viceroys, Guirior in 1773 and Gil Lemos in 1789, made great efforts to recover Cartagena as a market for local flour.33 Both were unsuccessful. Therefore, both the radical opposition by Santa Fe authorities, merchants, and landowners to the creation of the Consulado de Comercio of Cartagena and the instruction to revitalize the Opón road, established by the Crown in 1795 as one of the Consulado’s obligations, were clearly related to the capital’s hope of guaranteeing the Cartagena market for its commercial products, that is, to the battle over who would become the main source of wheat flour for Cartagena.

Conflict between Cartagena and Santa Fe de Bogotá  75 VI In 1807, foreign wheat flour imported by Cartagena increased to 4,411 loads, slightly over 60 percent of the total consumed in the city. According to Field Marshal Antonio Narváez, general commander of the army stationed in the city, it was necessary to import wheat flour from the United States because Santa Fe had been unable to supply the amount necessary for the port’s consumption. In addition, foreign flour not only arrived in better condition but was also cheaper.34 In 1809, the failure of the corn and rice harvests raised the demand for wheat flour to 8,000 loads. This was the main reason why, from April to June of that year, against the viceroy’s will, Cartagena’s government authorized nine new US ships loaded with foodstuffs, especially flour, to enter the bay and unload its products.35 On the eve of the struggle for independence, neutral trade became another factor intimately related to the conflict over the construction of internal roads and the local consumption of wheat flour, that is, to the regional conflict between Cartagena merchants and their Consulado, on the one hand, and Santa Fe merchants and the colonial government, on the other. I shall refer to its political implications in the next chapter. José Ignacio de Pombo’s intellectual influence shaped the liberal character of Cartagena’s Consulado during its short existence. Pombo wrote all of its reports known so far, and almost all of them, elaborated between 1795 and 1810, refer to the establishment of the neutral trade as a necessary measure to stimulate production and foreign trade. In effect, these reports contain above all the merchants’ documented and sometimes eager request to be allowed to trade legally with neutral ports in times of war. In the final analysis, one of the Consulado’s most important activities in those fifteen years was its unsuccessful struggle to convince the Crown and the viceroys of the advantages for both Spain and the viceroyalty of authorizing Cartagena to participate in that trade. The origins of the issue of neutral trade must be dated several decades earlier, together with the first petitions by Cartagena’s merchants to establish the Consulado. Toward the late 1780s, a long period of trade with the neutral ports of the Caribbean came to an end. In 1781, the beginning of the war with England led the Crown to authorize such trade with rebel Anglo-​Saxon colonies in America. After the 1783 Treaty of Paris, Spain attempted to reestablish its monopoly over colonial trade, closing its American ports to foreign ships, under the terms of a royal decree issued on January 20, 1784. However, through concessions granted to individuals, most of them to import enslaved people, the neutral trade continued until 1785, when the viceroy/​archbishop Caballero y Góngora opened the ports of Cartagena and Santa Marta to merchants from Jamaica, Curaçao, and the United States. Neutral trade in New Granada actually lasted from 1781 to 1789. According to Caballero y Góngora, a series of military, economic, and social factors led it to maintain this abnormal situation during his exercise of viceregal authority. The need to fund the colonization of Darien, to stimulate the

76  Conflict between Cartagena and Santa Fe de Bogotá growth of customs revenues, and to import wheat flour to Cartagena were some of the issues that justified this enlightened viceroy’s commercial policy.36 In 1789, the newly appointed viceroy Gil Lemos harshly criticized Caballero y Góngora’s commercial policy and once again forbade the so-​ called neutral trade, arguing that it had stimulated contraband and ruined agriculture.37 Santa Fe’s council employed the same arguments when it agreed in writing with the viceroyalty’s top authority. In contrast, the representatives of commerce of Cartagena, eager to defend Caballero y Góngora’s commercial policy, demonstrated with numbers the growth of the internal production and the legal trade that took place in the five years between 1785 and 1789.38 Why then did the new viceroy fail to see the economic advantages of his predecessor’s commercial policy? The key to the matter is that, while the neutral trade further debilitated the already troubled production of wheat flour in the country’s interior, it stimulated that of certain tropical products, such as cotton and palo brasilete, in which Cartagena’s merchants invested. Once again, behind the conflict there were two contradictory regional economic development projects, derived from the opposing interests of the elites from Cartagena and Santa Fe de Bogotá. The viceroyalty’s commercial policy remained steadfast in its prohibition of trade with foreign ports of the Caribbean and the United States until 1797, when the harm caused by yet another war to the empire’s economy forced it to open its ports in the Americas once again. The declaration of war with England in 1796 led to the royal degree of November 18, 1797, and opened Spanish American colonies once again to the neutral trade. The new policy acknowledged the empire’s inability to supply its colonies with the most basic products. Nonetheless, while other ports of the Caribbean, such as Havana and Caracas, fully enjoyed the reestablishment of neutral trade with the United States, the ports of New Granada did not. The intense contraband and a limited interpretation of the 1797 royal decree by the viceroy and the Audit Office of Santa Fe made that trade nearly impossible.39 In the two years during which the 1797 royal decree was in effect, only four commercial expeditions from the United States arrived at the ports of New Granada, three to Cartagena and one to Santa Marta. In spite of such a small number, the last two US ships to arrive to Cartagena were unable to sell their products. The city was full of all sorts of English and even Spanish products introduced illegally. Since the beginning of the war, only one small ship arrived from Spain. Contraband, the main activity of Caribbean merchants, had filled the void left by the almost complete suspension of the legal trade.40 In an elaborate compilation of statistics on the legal and illegal trade in the final years of the colonial period, José Ignacio de Pombo estimated that New Granada’s import and export trade during the fifteen years from 1788 to 1803 grew from 6 million to 8.4 million pesos per year, an increase of almost 30 percent. Pombo especially highlighted the extraordinary growth of export agriculture, which went

Conflict between Cartagena and Santa Fe de Bogotá  77 from 200,000 pesos in 1788 to 1.2 million in 1803, a 500 percent increase. Of the 1.2 million in 1803, cotton was responsible for more than 60 percent; together with palo brasilete and cocoa, it made up 80 percent of the total. The export of these three tropical products tripled in the last fifteen years, especially along the coast. The most outstanding fact was that the considerable growth of export agriculture occurring in this period seems to have been the result of a parallel growth of the illegal trade with Jamaica and Curaçao. As Pombo demonstrated in his knowledgeable essay, contraband was responsible for most of New Granada’s exports, especially cotton and palo brasilete, and represented no less than 50 percent of the total export trade—​a very conservative estimate. Actually, Pombo believed that the contribution of illegal trade to the total export trade was much greater.41 Contraband, as René de la Pedraja demonstrated in an outstanding essay, was concentrated in Santa Marta, Mompox, and Barranquilla, more than Cartagena. However, although physically carried out in neighboring ports, the clandestine trade was controlled by Cartagena’s merchants.42 As we have seen, when the royal decree of November 18, 1797, became known in other Spanish dominions, it had a different effect. Since Havana and Caracas had unlimited neutral trade due to a liberal interpretation of the royal decree, most historians who examine the issue have overlooked the restrictions established to the trade authorized with neutral ports. First, that opening was limited to trade with the United States, excluding other neutral foreign colonies. Second, foreigners could only transport from Anglo-​Saxon ports in America those products selected by Spain for re-​export to its American colonies. Third, the load should belong to Spaniards. Finally, the last and fundamental restriction established that Spanish American colonies could purchase products from the United States, but could not sell their own goods there. In other words, US ships could transport products from Spanish American colonies to Spain, but not to the United States.43 The 1797 royal decree clearly reflects that Cadiz’s monopoly did not relinquish its control over the commerce of Spain’s American colonies. Unable to maintain overseas trade, the large Cadiz merchants attempted to guarantee the arrival of colonial products to Spanish ports onboard US ships, while solving the very serious issue of supplying the colonies. In this regard, the role of the local authorities was decisive. Regarding the permission granted for neutral trade, as with many other matters, the flexibility of its interpretation by viceroys, intendants, and captains played a decisive role. In Havana, Caracas, and Buenos Aires, the colonial governments were allied with plantation owners and merchants, so that in those flourishing ports, the restrictions established in the 1797 decree had no weight and in practice they were never enforced. But in New Granada, Viceroy Mendinueta and his Audit Office, located in the Andes thousands of kilometers away from the drama of the ports, tormented by the intense contraband of the northern coast and preoccupied with the unfortunate fate of Andean flour, applied the 1797 royal decree literally and restrictively.44

78  Conflict between Cartagena and Santa Fe de Bogotá In the 1800 report on contraband, Pombo was perfectly aware of the decisive role of colonial authorities in applying the royal decrees on commerce and of Cartagena’s disadvantageous position relative to other Caribbean ports. In a letter that is outstanding for its lucidity regarding colonial politics, he wrote to Viceroy Mendinueta: The metropolis has the obligation to supply its colonies with everything they need for their consumption and to export all fruits and products of their soil, which is their only resource for subsistence and happiness. Only by complying fully with these obligations, by protecting and defending them from the common enemy, can it enjoy the privilege of exclusive commerce. If those obligations are not or cannot be met, the said privilege ceases and the government is authorized and required to provide them with other means to satisfy those needs. These principles of eternal justice have always made foreigners open their colonies in America to neutral nations during wartime: they have appealed to the enlightened chiefs of the province of Caracas, the island of Cuba, and other Spanish possessions to do likewise during the present war, even before the receipt of the Royal Decree of November 18, 1797, and after that of April 20, 1799, which revokes it. But are Your Excellency’s faculties not superior to those of those chiefs? Is your zeal and love of justice and the good of the state not equal? Is your desire for the prosperity and happiness of this important kingdom that has been entrusted to you not well known, or are those vassals of a higher condition or is their happiness more important? Do they deserve more protections, or is justice not distributive?45 In September 1805, the Consulado of Cartagena sent to Spain a detailed and comprehensive statistical report on the city’s commerce the previous year. This document stands out for being the only one in its class written after the declaration of war in 1796. As such, it reflects the essential changes that took place in the city’s foreign trade and the general tendencies of that activity on the eve of the Independence movement. Three years after the end of the conflict with England, Spain had still not recovered the prewar levels of trade with Cartagena. According to Pombo, trade with Spain in 1788 amounted to around 6,000,000 pesos; sixteen years later, it was 3,372,222 pesos—​in other words, almost half of what it had been. More importantly, imports from Spain had fallen about 60 percent, valued only at 903,644 pesos in 1804, compared to 3,000,000 in 1788. On the other hand, the metropolis’s exports had remained more or less constant at 2,168,578 pesos. Of these, 794,831, or more than 30 percent, belonged to the category “fruits.” Essentially, in 1804, Cartagena paid for almost all of its imports from Spain with the value of its products.46 In contrast, Cartagena’s trade with other Spanish American colonies, especially with those located in the Caribbean, increased considerably during

Conflict between Cartagena and Santa Fe de Bogotá  79 wartime. Pombo estimated the value of this trade in 1788 at 500,000 pesos. In 1804, it was already equivalent to 1,436,925 pesos—​that is, almost threefold. The increase in export agriculture noted by Pombo in his 1804 report was confirmed by the statistics gathered by the Consulado. In the same period, the legal export of local products to Spain and the other colonies amounted only to 917,000 pesos. However, it must have been at least twice as much, considering the enormous contraband taking place along the coast. In addition, as Pombo himself observed, a considerable part of the legal imports was actually disguised contraband.47 The growth of export agriculture and illegal trade led Cartagena’s large merchants to view the Caribbean ocean as their natural market. However, as Jacques Barbier correctly demonstrates, Spain’s commercial policy from 1805 to 1808 was oriented by the urgent need for money. In addition to opposing neutral trade, the Spanish government decided to hand over Cartagena’s commerce to the agents of the Caja de Consolidación de Vales Reales, whose sole purpose was to help pay the Crown’s accumulated debts. The initial result was that the director of the Caja de Consolidación handed control over Cartagena’s commerce to the German trading house M. Van Heiningen Company. This trading house organized a few trips from Germany to Cartagena in 1805 and 1806, and took tropical products from the Colombian Caribbean to be traded in Germany. But in 1807 and 1808, Cartagena’s commerce was handed over to the English trading house Gordon Murphy, whose merchants had no interest in promoting tropical exports. Its only goal was to transport the gold and silver deposited in the port of Cartagena to the king. Barbier correctly considered Spain’s commercial policy for Cartagena a complete disaster during the reign of Charles IV.48 It was a disaster not only for the Crown but even more so for Cartagena’s merchants. In November 1808, the consulate bitterly complained that the only legal trade taking place in Cartagena was in the hands of foreigners, and warned the king in the most uncompromising terms that saving this state, which is collapsing like a building […] demands with all justice a general, prompt, and forceful remedy, impartially applied. Such remedy, sir, is no other, nor can it be, than to open our ports to all friendly or neutral nations in America, and for us to be able to go to theirs.49 There is no doubt that the chaos of commerce and the perception of Cartagena’s merchants that their interests were of no concern to the plans of the viceroy and the rest of Santa Fe’s authorities had much to do with the city’s movement for autonomy, which did not begin in 1810 but in August 1809, for the purpose of liberating the port, as we shall see in the next chapter.

80  Conflict between Cartagena and Santa Fe de Bogotá VII The very serious conflict regarding trade and communications between the two large cities of the viceroyalty was compounded by an older source of discord. Throughout the eighteenth century, since the very creation of the viceroyalty, New Granada’s viceroys referred to Cartagena in their reports as a heavy burden that consumed the entire kingdom’s surplus. According to them, they could not invest in Santa Fe’s development due to the shortage of capital, which was consumed in the construction and maintenance of Cartagena’s fortifications.50 The authorities in Santa Fe had good reasons to believe that Cartagena had learned to live off others. In the most complete study we know of on the finances of the Viceroyalty of New Granada in the second half of the eighteenth century, Miklos Pogonyi establishes Cartagena’s average yearly expenditure for the period 1766–​1777 at 550,000 pesos. The annual income, on the other hand, was less than 200,000 pesos, which resulted in a deficit of 350,000 pesos per year. Sixty percent of this deficit was covered by the inland provinces. Mompox provided 10 percent, and Popayán and Quito the other 30 percent. Santa Fe sent 139,000 pesos, 113,000 of which came from regional treasuries, which sent their surplus to the capital. The Santa Fe treasury provided only 26,000 pesos.51 Cartagena’s authorities correctly argued that most of the province’s very large budget was not employed to foster its material progress, but to maintain the military apparatus to defend the vast Andean kingdoms. In 1774, for example, Cartagena’s annual expenditures amounted to 543,267 pesos, at least 411,016 of which were invested in military matters (wages for the military personnel, fortifications, coastguards, war expenditures)—​in other words, about 80 percent of the city’s total budget. Only 13,855 pesos, that is, little more than 2 percent, was employed in civilian wages. Practically nothing was invested in development works.52 Thirty years later, on the eve of the Independence movement, the system continued operating in a similar way. The only noteworthy change was the significant increase in military expenses, consolidating Cartagena’s military function. On the other hand, everything seems to indicate that Quito had assumed most of the expenditures. During the decade from 1800 to 1810, Cartagena had an annual expenditure of around 900,000 pesos distributed as follows: military wages, 300,000; coast guard, 300,000; fortifications, 50,000; other military expenditures, 160,000; civilian wages and expenditures, 60,000; other expenses, 10,000. In other words, 90 percent of all investments were related to the city’s defense.53 Where did such large resources to sustain the military apparatus come from? Let us see: the province of Cartagena produced approximately 500,000 pesos per year, of which 300,000 came from customs revenues from tobacco and spirits. Mompox in turn contributed with 50,000 pesos for the stronghold’s expenditures. The remaining 120,000 pesos came from a multitude of small sources of revenue in the province. The deficit was covered with 250,000 pesos provided by Quito per year, and the rest with money from the inland provinces.54

Conflict between Cartagena and Santa Fe de Bogotá  81 In the first decade of the nineteenth century, payments from Santa Fe and Quito arrived in Cartagena at irregular intervals, and after 1810 they stopped altogether.55 With the beginning of the political crisis, Quito and Santa Fe needed their money to cover their own military expenses. In addition, Spain, overwhelmed with the war with France, required its colonies to send large amounts of gold and silver. VIII For Cartagena’s authorities, the relationship between its projects of economic transformation and political autonomy started to become clear. The only way to keep from depending on money from other provinces of the kingdom was to foster a sufficiently large free trade to replace it with the income from customs, but experience demonstrated that it was impossible to attain this under the tutelage of the Viceroyalty of Santa Fe. The solution was therefore to obtain complete freedom in terms of internal economic affairs. Jose Ignacio de Pombo’s last essay is a product of that reflection. In 1810, Pombo wrote his most brilliant and extensive reformist essay, in the form of a government plan for the province of Cartagena.56 The plan’s central aspect consisted of a set of recommendations intended to foster agriculture and commerce as instruments to increase the province’s wealth and income. For Pombo, disciplining the labor force and strengthening small free producers would allow expanding agricultural production for export. But above all, it would be the point of departure to attain a more ambitious objective: the formation of a class of citizens with a capitalist work ethic, practically nonexistent in the province’s rural areas. This, together with a robust free trade capable of rendering contraband useless, would lead to the paradise dreamed by Pombo: to transform Cartagena from an unproductive stronghold dependent on external subsidies into a cosmopolitan commercial port capable of leading the Colombian Caribbean to modern progress. The following is certain: Pombo did not speak in the name of national interests—​which nation?—​and certainly not in the name of the inland provinces. He was convinced that Cartagena’s political autonomy was a necessary prerequisite for its economic progress. Notes 1 For a more detailed study of the role of Cartagena’s Consulado de Comercio, see Alfonso Múnera, “Merchants in Transition: The Cartagena Consulado and the Problem of Regionalism, 1750–​1815” (MA thesis, University of Connecticut, 1989). 2 In one of his recent studies, Anthony McFarlane says, “Pombo’s commitment to reform was not shared by all the merchant community in Cartagena,” and that he “was in many ways an exceptional figure among the merchants of Cartagena [whose] ideas probably had more in common with the ‘enlightened’ Creole minority of the capital than with the peninsular businessman of the cartagenero mercantile elite.” See

82  Conflict between Cartagena and Santa Fe de Bogotá Anthony McFarlane, Colombia before Independence: Economy, Society and Politics under Bourbon Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 314. 3 Expediente sobre la formación del Consulado de Comercio de Cartagena, 1795, AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 957. 4 Jacques A. Barbier, “The Culmination of the Bourbon Reforms, 1787–​1792,” Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 57 (February 1977): 24. See also Manuel Nunes Díaz, El Real Consulado de Caracas (Caracas, 1971), pp. 199–​203 and 561–​578. 5 Múnera, “Merchants in Transition,” pp. 82–​83. 6 Expediente sobre la formación del Consulado de Comercio de Cartagena, 1795. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 “Cédula de erección del Consulado de Comercio de Cartagena, 1795,” AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 957. For more detailed information on the consulates of Caracas and Havana, see Nunes Díaz, El Real Consulado de Caracas, pp. 207 and 284; and Peter Lampros, “Merchant-​Planter Cooperation and Conflict: The Havana Consulado, 1794–​1832” (PhD. diss., Tulane University, 1980), pp. 57–​59. 10 “Cédula de erección del Consulado de Comercio de Cartagena, 1795.” 11 El cabildo del Socorro al virrey, 24 July 1804, in AGN: Consulados, t. I, fs. 624–​627. See also, Solicitud de José M. Acevedo al virrey, Santa Fe, 19 November 1804, in AGN: Consulados, t. III. 12 See McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, pp. 314–​323. 13 “Relación de méritos de José I. de Pombo.” 14 The most complete documentation on the dispute over the establishment of a printing press in Cartagena is found in José Toribio Medina, La imprenta en Cartagena de Indias, 1809–​1820 (Santiago de Chile, 1904), pp. 19–​49. 15 See Elecciones de funcionarios del consulado de Cartagena de Indias, 1803–​1807, in AGI: Santa Fe, legajos 959, 960, 1016. 16 See Expediente sobre la formación del consulado de Santa Fe, 1796, AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 957. 17 Santa Fe’s merchants, supported by the viceroys, requested authorization from Madrid to create their own Consulado at least in 1796, 1804, and 1806. See Petición de los comerciantes de Santa Fe sobre la formación de un consulado, 1806, AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 960. 18 Expediente sobre la formación de un consulado de comercio en Santa Fe, 1796. 19 Expediente sobre la formación de un consulado de comercio en Santa Fe, 1806. 20 Expediente sobre la formación de un consulado de comercio en Santa Fe, 1796. 21 This is one of the conclusions proposed by McFarlane in “Comercio y monopolio en la Nueva Granada. El consulado de Cartagena de Indias,” Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura 11 (1983): 68. 22 Miklos Pogonyi, “The Search for Trade and Profit in Bourbon Colombia, 1767–​1777” (PhD diss., University of New Mexico, 1978), pp. 97 and 101. 23 Aquileo Parra, Memorias (Bogotá: Librería Colombiana, 1912), pp. 42–​76. 24 Informe del consulado de Cartagena sobre los caminos proyectados al río Magdalena, June 30, 1808, AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 960. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid.

Conflict between Cartagena and Santa Fe de Bogotá  83 28 As in colonial times, the poor state of communication routes in the nineteenth century was one of the main obstacles to the country’s modernization. In contrast with the lack of major studies regarding the eighteenth century, there is an abundant literature on the development of the transportation system in the nineteenth century. See especially Robert Gilmore and John Parker Harrison, “Juan Bernardo Elbers and the Introduction of Steam Navigation on the Magdalena River,” Hispanic American Historical Review 28 (August 1948): 335–​359; John Parker Harrison, “Introduction of Steam Navigation on the Magdalena Rivers” (MA thesis, University of California, 1948); Theodore Hoffman, “A History of Railway Concession and Railway Development Policy in Colombia to 1943” (PhD diss., American University, 1947); and Alfredo Díaz Ortega, Ferrocarriles colombianos, 3 vols. (Bogotá: Imprenta Nacional, 1920–​1949). 29 On Caracas, see Nunes Díaz, El Real Consulado de Caracas, pp. 489–​558. On Havana, see Manuel Moreno Fraginals, El Ingenio: complejo económico-​social cubano del azúcar, 3 vols. (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1978), vol. I, pp. 148–​157. 30 Robert West, La minería de aluvión en Colombia durante el período colonial (Bogotá: Imprenta Nacional, 1972), p. 114. 31 Pogonyi, “The Search for Trade,” pp. 89–​105. 32 Ibid., pp. 85–​104; José de Solís, “Relación de mando,” in Germán Colmenares, comp., Relaciones e informes de los gobernantes de la Nueva Granada (Bogotá: Banco Popular, 1989), vol. I, p. 114. 33 Manuel de Guirior, “Relación de mando,” and Francisco Gil y Lemos, “Relación de mando,” in Colmenares, Relaciones e informes, vol. I, pp. 295–​296 and vol. II, pp. 15–​16. 34 In Expediente sobre escasez de alimentos en Cartagena, 1809, AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 745. 35 Ibid. 36 Caballero y Góngora, “Relación de mando,” pp. 445–​449. 37 Gil Lemos, “Relación de mando,” pp. 18–​19. 38 Expediente sobre la formación del Consulado de Comercio de Cartagena, 1795. 39 Pombo, Informe del Consulado de Comercio de Cartagena sobre contrabando, 1800. 40 Ibid. 41 Pombo, Informe del Consulado de Comercio de Cartagena sobre contrabando, 1804. 42 René de la Pedraja, “El comienzo de la crisis en el comercio colonial: la Nueva Granada, 1796–​1801,” Desarrollo y Sociedad 2 (Bogotá, CEDE, 1979), pp. 222–​225. 43 Virrey Mendinueta al secretario de Estado, 1798, AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 961; Pombo, Informe del Consulado de Comercio de Cartagena sobre contrabando, 1800. 44 Ibid. 45 Pombo, Informe del Consulado de Cartagena sobre contrabando, 1800. 46 Cuadro de importación y exportación de Cartagena en 1804, AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 1131. 47 Ibid. 48 Jacques Barbier, “Commercial Reform and Comercio Neutral in Cartagena de Indias, 1788–​1808,” in Reform and Insurrection in Bourbon New Granada and Peru, ed. John Fisher, Allan Kuethe, and Anthony McFarlane (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), pp. 116–​120. 49 Respuesta del Consulado de Comercio de Cartagena al virrey sobre donativos, November 10, 1808, AGN: Consulados, t. I, fs. 501–​512.

84  Conflict between Cartagena and Santa Fe de Bogotá 5 0 See Colmenares, Relaciones e informes, vol. I, pp. 109–​110, 133, and 328. 51 Pogonyi, “The Search for Trade,” pp. 139–​148. 52 Ibid. 53 Cuadro Revolucionario y Estado Actual de la Provincia de Cartagena, in Gaceta del Gobierno de Cartagena de Indias, September 14, 1816, Cartagena: Biblioteca Bartolomé Calvo, Colección de microfilm, periódicos, rollo 93. 54 Ibid. 55 Oficio del presidente de Cartagena al de Cundinamarca, Cartagena, March 30, 1812, in José Manuel Restrepo, Documentos importantes de Nueva Granada, Venezuela y Colombia (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional, 1969), vol. I, pp. 63–​67. 56 José I. de Pombo, “Informe del Real Consulado de Cartagena de Indias a la suprema junta provincial de la misma, 1810,” in Escritos de dos economistas coloniales, ed. Sergio Ortiz (Bogotá: Banco de la República, 1965), pp. 135–​271.

5 Cartagena’s struggle for political autonomy

I The increasing economic conflict between Santa Fe and Cartagena and the first political expressions of open rebellion of the latter against the capital’s authorities in 1809 demonstrated the importance of the interests at play and the existence of more ambitious goals by Cartagena’s elites. Imperial Spain’s crisis, with its king imprisoned, on the verge of falling to the French, and dominated by liberal reformists from Cadiz, contributed to endow the already long conflict between the most powerful regional elites of New Granada with a new political content. However, this crisis was certainly not an isolated external factor that acted on the events in America. On the contrary, its effects are inseparable from the final bankruptcy of the colonial economy and of the new liberal reformist projects in vogue in American colonies. In January 1809, Viceroy Amar reluctantly agreed to open the port of Cartagena, after receiving from that city’s Consulado de Comercio a distressed request in late 1808, where it clearly warned of the fragile political situation. However, the permission granted by the viceroy contained two serious limitations. On the one hand, it allowed trade only with English colonies, and, on the other hand, it uncompromisingly forbid the import of foreign flour.1 As time showed, this solution only aggravated the problem. Since 1807, Cartagena’s council had made efforts to demonstrate to the authorities in Santa Fe that there was a serious shortage of foodstuffs in the city. According to its own inquiries, as a result of a prolonged drought that had significantly reduced the production of corn and rice, it was necessary to import more flour than the inland provinces could provide.2 In a long and expensive investigation undertaken by the council, peasants, bakers, military personnel, landowners, and merchants unanimously asserted that there was insufficient corn and rice in the province to supply Cartagena. The shortage of basic foodstuffs in the people’s diet had to be immediately solved by importing flour and other products. Viceroy Amar and his advisers, stubborn in their resolution to protect

DOI: 10.4324/9781003381198-6

86  Cartagena’s struggle for political autonomy inland flour, and doubtful of anything that came from the coast, ignored the arguments of Cartagena’s council.3 The 1809 decree that granted permission to trade with English colonies was a way to counter the requests of Cartagena’s merchants, but in a subtler manner. They were apparently allowed neutral trade, but they were simultaneously denied what everyone knew they wanted: to trade with the United States. To make things worse, in March of that same year, Madrid sent a bulletin to its colonies forbidding neutral trade. Caracas, Havana, and San Juan did not even acknowledge receipt and continued openly trading with the United States and other foreign nations. In New Granada, in contrast, the viceroy used that bulletin against Cartagena.4 On April 12, 1809, one month after Madrid prohibited neutral trade, Cartagena’s authorities allowed the entry of a US schooner loaded with flour, ham, rice, and other foodstuffs. For the first time in those long years of dispute with Santa Fe, Cartagena dared openly disobey the viceroy’s directives regarding commerce and acted on its own. The schooner Hetty had left the port of Baltimore chartered by US merchant Juan M. Jaden. Its consignee in Cartagena was Juan de Dios Amador, a Cartagenan lawyer and merchant and a member of the council, son of Esteban de Amador, one of the most important Spanish merchants in Cartagena and brother-​in-​law of José Ignacio de Pombo, the Consulado’s director.5 A few days after the schooner’s arrival, the governor and the customs director allowed the entry into the port of two more schooners from Virginia and Baltimore, also laded with flour and other foodstuffs. Later, they sent the respective documentation to the viceroy, justifying their actions with the shortage of foodstuffs in Cartagena and requesting his approval.6 The viceroy’s reaction, through a decree issued on July 4, was to forbid trade with the United States, ordering the return of the foreign flour and threatening the governor and the customs director with severe penalties. One of the threats was to impose a fine of 500 pesos if any other US schooner entered the port. The viceroy made this drastic decision following the advice of the very influential Tribunal Mayor y Real Audiencia de Cuentas of Santa Fe, his advisory body on commercial affairs. It is significant that this tribunal emphasized precisely the import of flour because it would harm agriculture in the interior.7 This was perhaps the most reckless decision made by Viceroy Amar. As the events would soon demonstrate, the only possibility this official had of surviving the growing political instability in the colonies was to consolidate an alliance with Cartagena, a stronghold capable of containing any attempt at rebellion in the kingdom’s interior.8 Spain was undergoing a profound crisis in the summer of 1809. The king and most of the nation’s territory were in the hands of the French invaders; the Central Governing Junta attempted to maintain the empire alive, but was forced to flee Aranjuez and seek refuge in Andalucía, and the national war was being financed by the colonies and by England, Spain’s traditional enemy.9

Cartagena’s struggle for political autonomy  87 On the other hand, Quito’s insurrection in August 1809 and the imprisonment of the Santa Fe leader Antonio Nariño in a prison in Cartagena demonstrated the fragility of the internal political situation.10 The immediate consequences of the July 4 decree were worse than the viceroy and his advisers could have expected. On August 12, the Cartagena council held a special session to respond to the viceroy’s “insults and threats,” rejected the order by Santa Fe’s authorities, and in open defiance they requested the governor to authorize trade with the United States, and of course the free import of flour, once and for all.11 It is worth examining the details of this meeting because, even though it has been entirely ignored, even by the most recent historiography, it marks the beginning of Cartagena’s struggle for political autonomy, that is, the first serious attempts at becoming independent from Santa Fe. II The 1809 council was made up by the most representative members of Cartagena’s Creole and Spanish elites. Of its fifteen members, including the two ordinary mayors and the public prosecutor, eight were Creoles and seven were Spanish. Among the Creoles, all of them belonging to the highest social class, two were merchants; two were landowners, one of them a member of the Consulado and the other one son of Antonio de Narváez y la Torre, the most powerful military officer in New Granada; and four were lawyers, three of whom came from merchant families. All seven Spaniards were merchants and had headed Cartagena’s Consulado de Comercio at some point. Thus, out of the fifteen members, nine were merchants and three were sons of important merchants. The other three, a landowner and two lawyers, were sons of military officers.12 Three things seem clear in principle: first, a considerable number of members of the 1809 council, which decided to recommend an open confrontation with the capital’s authorities and to open the port of Cartagena to trade with the United States, were Spanish. Second, not only were most members merchants, but some of them were among the most powerful in the Consulado de Comercio, such as Santiago González and Lázaro Herrera. Third, among the Creoles in the council, José A. de Ayos, José M. Castillo y Rada, Juan Salvador Narváez, José M. Benito Revollo, Juan de Dios Amador, and Germán Gutiérrez de Piñeres, that is, six of the eight, were among the main leaders of the struggle for independence. The words pronounced in the council by both the Creoles and the Spanish are indicative of the profound change underway in Cartagena’s politics, apparently still unnoticed by the viceregal authorities. These representatives of the elites demonstrated a certainty regarding the defense of their own interests that they did not have before. They felt supported by the liberal and reformist demagogy of the Cadiz government and were sure that Spain was too busy with the war with France to intervene in the internal affairs of its American colonies. That is

88  Cartagena’s struggle for political autonomy why they dared to defend their project of integration with Caribbean commerce openly and to reject the decisions made in Santa Fe. The Creoles Ayos, Benito Revollo, and Narváez, together with the Spaniards González and Herrera, took the stand in the council on August 12. Their interventions made it clear that commerce with the United States was no longer a circumstantial demand, but the marrow of a program of aperture and economic freedom still timidly outlined. The model was the insular Caribbean, Cuba and Jamaica in particular, and the argument seemed quite simple: the entire Caribbean traded with the United States. The English, French, and Spanish Caribbean obtained supplies from the United States because its flour was better and cheaper, and also because that nation was the best buyer of tropical products. Cartagena should therefore do likewise, since the flour it purchased from the inland provinces was of a lower quality and more expensive, and only US merchants were willing to receive in exchange the local products that Cartagenan merchants needed to sell.13 For the first time, the city’s right to decide under equal conditions with the other provinces, including the Spanish ones, on their economic affairs, was openly discussed, and even one of the most conservative Spaniards of the Consulado, Lázaro Herrera, attacked the viceroy’s decree “based on the right granted to us by the Supreme Central Junta, which has repeatedly declared that the Americas should not be considered conquered countries or simple colonies, and therefore enjoy the same prerogatives and privileges as the peninsula.” And he added, “I would ask the members of the Tribunal de Cuentas whether the part of the kingdom where flour is produced has the right to enrich in obvious prejudice of the other respectable part, which deserves the highest consideration.”14 What is noteworthy here is that the council members centered their attacks on the viceroy and his Creole advisers in Santa Fe. It is they whom the council accused of defending the interests of the Andean landowners and merchants to the detriment of Cartagena, and of wanting to force them to purchase their flour.15 In spite of the council’s suggestion of ordering the opening of the port, the governor, Blas de Soria, decided to send the dossier for consultation to Field Marshal Antonio de Narváez, general commander of the armies, and to José Ignacio de Pombo. The response came swiftly: their unconditional support of the council’s request. The reports by Narváez and Pombo clearly demonstrate that the central aspect of the entire affair was to take control over the province’s economic affairs once and for all. Both of them pointed out that, just as the province of Catalonia was free to purchase flour from abroad and not from Castile, Cartagena should have the same right relative to Santa Fe. “The government has never thought of supporting the Castilian provinces that produce wheat in abundance,” says Pombo in his report dated September 18, “by forbidding the entry of foreigners into the ports of Catalonia, Valencia, and Murcia, where not enough wheat is produced for their consumption, because the precarious benefits to the former provinces would ruin the latter.” In addition, he adds that “there is no

Cartagena’s struggle for political autonomy  89 comparison in terms of distances or the difficulties presented by the roads or the costs of transportation between the coastal provinces and the kingdom’s interior, and those of the former between them, nor can the absolute lack of active trade experienced in the latter, which do not trade any local product with the interior, be compared with the considerable trade enjoyed by Spanish coastal provinces with Mediterranean provinces.” Finally, he asks, “And if in spite those advantages, such prohibition has never been considered there, even in times of abundance, because it is deemed harmful, how could it not be so here, in the midst of shortage and so many difficulties?” “Only ignorance or egoism,” he answers his own question, “can disregard or oppose a measure demanded by circumstances, good politics, justice, and necessity.” Like Narváez, Pombo concluded in his report warning the viceroy of the threat of a hungry people: “The same menace must be feared from the people, especially laborers, artisans, and poor people, who are the most plentiful […] because hunger knows no respect and admits no delays.”16 After receiving the reports from the general commander of the armies and the Consulado’s director, Governor Soria authorized trade with the United States and the massive import of flour and all sorts of foodstuffs, through a decree issued on August 28, 1809.17 Still, on February 1810, the recently arrived Governor Montes sent an extensive report to the viceroy where he explained that US ships continued to enter the port without his permission, and insinuated that a strong alliance between Cartagena’s elites had developed in favor of the port’s opening, against which he could do nothing.18 At this point, we can assert that at least two very important things had occurred. The first was that the viceroy’s authority had been disregarded and the frailty and ineffectiveness of his power had been revealed. The second was that Cartagena’s elites had gained control over the city’s economic affairs and, as we shall see shortly, they were not content with that first victory and coveted a political control that would allow them to put an end to Santa Fe’s dominion. Under the new circumstances brought about by the empire’s crisis, the old political balance had disappeared. Madrid was no longer an arbitrator of internal conflicts in New Granada and became merely another player that, depending on the course of events, could be either an ally or an enemy. III The year 1810 was decisive for the political ambitions of Cartagena’s elites. Before fully examining the process whereby enlightened Cartagenans appropriated political power and took their struggle against Santa Fe to its ultimate consequences, it is important to know who were the members of the influential Tribunal de Cuentas headquartered in the capital city, advisers to the viceroy on commercial affairs and sworn enemies of the coastal merchants. Doing so will allow us to better understand the reasons for the central conflict in the misnamed and never well explained “Patria boba” (“Foolish Fatherland,” the First Republic of New Granada).

90  Cartagena’s struggle for political autonomy Gregorio Domínguez, Manuel Bernardo Álvarez, and Matías de Urdaneta composed the Tribunal Mayor y Real Audiencia de Cuentas de Santa Fe. This was the most powerful body after the Real Audiencia in the viceregal bureaucracy. Its mission was to supervise the royal revenues, especially those from commerce and the king’s monopolies. Its capacity to influence the viceroy’s economic decisions was immense.19 We know almost nothing of Matías Urdaneta. Of the other two, we know enough. Gregorio Domínguez de Tejada y Herreros and his brother Francisco were born in a small town of Old Castile in Spain. In the 1760s, both were already distinguished personalities of the Santa Fe aristocracy. In 1790, Gregorio was elected accountant of the Tribunal de Cuentas, a position he held until his death on December 14, 1810. His brother Francisco became one of the richest and most powerful Spaniards in Santa Fe in the last years of the century. He was mayor and council member a number of times and, more importantly for our story, Francisco Domínguez y Herreros headed the list of Santa Fe merchants who in 1795 opposed the establishment of the Consulado de Comercio in Cartagena and demanded its transfer to Santa Fe de Bogotá. Furthermore, his influence on the province’s merchants and landowners was so great that his name was proposed in 1796 to serve as the Consulado’s director in the capital, in the event that it was created. Francisco Domínguez died in 1812 without abandoning his royalist beliefs; however, one of his sons, José M. Domínguez del Castillo, was a member of the Supreme Junta of Santa Fe, the same one that dethroned Viceroy Amar and attempted to unite the provinces of New Granada under its government. In addition to being a very prosperous merchant, Don Francisco owned a very large hacienda in Simijaca called Aposentos. His son, the enlightened Creole and patriot Don José, inherited those lands.20 Manuel Bernardo Álvarez y Casal was a member of the most powerful family of Santa Fe’s viceregal bureaucracy and, paradoxically, one of the leaders of the 1810 revolt against Viceroy Amar y Borbón. His father, also named Manuel Bernardo, was a distinguished Spanish lawyer who, after holding a series of important positions in the bureaucracy in America, was appointed attorney of the Royal Audiencia of Santa Fe, a position he held from 1736 to 1755. In that position, Don Manuel married all of his daughters with members of the capital’s most distinguished families, thus creating the most powerful political clique of the viceroyalty in the second half of the eighteenth century. Among his sons-​in-​law were Vicente Nariño, royal official and accountant of the Tribunal de Cuentas; Manuel García Olano, general administrator of tobacco revenues; Benito del Casal y Montenegro, judge of the Royal Audiencia; and Francisco Robledo, general adviser to the viceroyalty and later judge of the Royal Audiencias of Guatemala and Mexico.21 According to historian John Phelan, one of the tasks accomplished by the general visiting regent Gutiérrez de Piñeres in 1778 was to destroy this clique’s power in Santa Fe’s government.22 However, the destruction must have been

Cartagena’s struggle for political autonomy  91 transitory, because in 1803 the son of the Royal Audiencia’s attorney, the Creole Manuel Bernardo Álvarez, was appointed accountant of the Tribunal Mayor y Real Audiencia de Cuentas. He was in that position when, on July 20, 1810, he was appointed representative of the extraordinary council that expelled Viceroy Amar from the city.23 A member of the capital’s Supreme Governing Junta, Álvarez was one of the most tenacious advocates of the idea of centralizing political power in Bogotá after Independence. Together with his two nephews, Jorge Tadeo Lozano and Antonio Nariño, he governed the province of Santa Fe during almost the entire Independence period. As we shall see later in this work, Nariño, together with his uncle, was an irreconcilable enemy of Cartagena’s governing elite. Finally, Manuel Bernardo Álvarez y Casal, a Creole aristocrat, a powerful bureaucrat of the viceroyalty, and a leader of the independence of Santa Fe, married a daughter of the Marquis of San Jorge, José María Lozano. This marquis was one of the most powerful landowners in Santa Fe, a large producer of flour, and a sworn enemy of Cartagena’s Consulado.24 It can safely be said that, while Cartagena’s elites had good reasons to be in conflict with the viceregal government, once the viceroy was expelled, they also had enough reasons to oppose the Creole bureaucracy that demanded the immediate recognition of their tradition as the center of power. The only difference was that now that bureaucracy proclaimed its right to command in the name of a presumed republic, of which no one had heard before. In this respect, Santa Fe bureaucrats presumed that independence from Spain had changed nothing. Phelan was right when he argued that there was a certain continuity between the Spanish-​Creole bureaucratic elite who governed New Granada in the eighteenth century and the Creoles who took power in 1810.25 The serious consequence of lacking of a national discourse revealed itself in the impossibility of filling the void left by the viceroy’s banishment. That discourse did not exist at the time and had never existed. Before 1810, not a single text was written in New Granada dealing with the issue of building an independent nation, nor was there a social sector capable of claiming a national space over regional interests and loyalties. When the political crisis took place, the power vacuum was not filled by an effort by the regional elites to unite to found the nation, but by an immediate and inevitable confrontation between them, which, as we have seen, was already present in a most serious manner between the most powerful elites of the Caribbean and the Andes. For that reason, any attempt at demonstrating that there was a process of national unity carried out by the Creoles, creating “national networks,” is inconsistent and leads to a blind alley in the face of the obvious fact that those Creoles, once they conquered power in their own provinces, tore each other to pieces. Considering the magnitude of the contradictions between them and the absence of a protonational tradition, such an outcome was inevitable. In 1810 there was no press, no army, no Church, no regular exchange of products capable of integrating the provinces, and the inability to understand this fact has led the

92  Cartagena’s struggle for political autonomy notion of the “Foolish fatherland” to persist. The reason given for the anarchy that followed Independence and the absolute failure of the nation’s formation, which resulted from the real conditions of our social existence, has been that its leaders were immature, naivety, and romantic. In actual fact, as we shall see from the aftermath of 1810, there was no foolishness but rather a great deal of tragedy. It is not by chance that Antonio Nariño, dictator of Santa Fe during the first independence, was a merchant, son of a member of the Tribunal y Real Audiencia de Cuentas and nephew of another member, or that the first governor of Cartagena in the same period was a renowned merchant, son of another renowned merchant. IV The strategy developed by Cartagena’s elites to take over the city’s government in 1810 was to a large extent a consequence of the events in Spain and the rest of America. We have seen how the Central Junta was expelled from Aranjuez and forced to take refuge in Seville, leaving the French in power over practically the entire Spanish territory, with the sole exception of Andalusia. But the final months of 1809 were even more disastrous for the cause of Ferdinand VII. Unable to resist the advance of Napoleon’s armies, the Central Junta, completely discredited and reviled by the Sevillian people, was forced to flee Seville and take refuge in Isla de León. On January 29, 1810, in an attempt to establish a less complicated and inefficient government body, the Junta issued its last decree, creating a five-​member council called La Regencia de España e Indias (the Regency of Spain and the Indies).26 Now reduced to the dominions of Cadiz and Isla de León, the monarchy’s defenders set their eyes on America once again. As never before, American gold and silver were essential for the empire’s survival. The Regency’s Council invited the Americans to elect representatives to the Cortes through the famous decree of February 4, 1810, which was accompanied by a declaration whereby the Cadiz liberals offered the Americans a presumed equality that they of course were not willing to grant in practice. However, they did give America’s reformist elites the best instrument to legitimize their attacks against viceroys and governors. The Creoles took great advantage of the following paragraph of the declaration: From now on, you, Spanish Americans, have been raised to the dignity of free men: you are no longer those who stooped under a yoke that was much heavier the further away you were from the center of power, looked upon with indifference, abused by greed, and destroyed by ignorance. Know that, upon pronouncing or writing the name of he who shall come to represent you in the national congress, your fate no longer depends on the ministers, the viceroys, or the governors; it is in your hands.27

Cartagena’s struggle for political autonomy  93 This declaration, written at a moment when the Creole elites were deeply convinced that Spain would fall to Napoleon’s troops, was reckless, to say the least. The result came swiftly—​on April 19, 1810, the Creole elite of Caracas began a series of uprisings that took place that year to dethrone the Spanish authorities in American colonies. Once both the general captain and the intendant were deposed, the government was taken over by a governing junta that, while not formally independent from Spain, made the radical decision to disavow the Cadiz Regency as the legitimate government of the Spanish nation.28 A similar attempt by the Creoles of Quito in 1809 did not end well. The movement began in early August, led by the most distinguished members of Quito’s aristocracy. Marquises, counts, and bishops became members of the Supreme Junta that was established once the Spanish government was deposed. The Spanish defeat was accomplished without spilling a drop of blood and the rebels’ objectives were much more modest than those of the arrogant Creoles of Caracas were. The last thing this Quito “nobility,” which maintained strong ties to Madrid, would have thought of doing was to propose anti-​colonial solutions. On the contrary, in a manifesto by the Junta, they clearly stated that the struggle’s highest objectives were to “maintain religion, the king, and the fatherland.” In other words, the peoples of the presidency of Quito did not mobilize to create a new political entity but to protect their king, Ferdinand, and their Spanish fatherland. The Junta’s argument to mobilize common people against the Spanish authorities of the province was based on the rumor that the Royal Audiencia, and its president, Colonel Castilla, in particular, wanted to hand over Quito to Bonaparte, and for that reason, no preparations were underway to defend it from the French. In order to legitimize the creation of a new governing body, the Quito Creoles argued that “just as all of Spain’s provinces, of which America was declared an integral part, had the right to establish governing juntas during the king’s captivity, Quito should enjoy the same right.”29 The uprising was brutally repressed by the armies sent through Santa Fe and Lima. Many of the Junta’s leaders were murdered in prison, and regular people were persecuted and massacred on the streets by soldiers from Lima.30 In October 1809, soon after making the decision not to recognize the viceroy’s authority in the province’s economic affairs, Cartagena’s council contented the Cadiz Regency by condemning the Quito uprising. As a consequence, the Spanish government granted Cartagena the title “Most noble and most loyal city.”31 This pattern of “pragmatic” behavior characterized the activities of Cartagena’s Creoles in the two following years, 1810 and 1811. Determined to take political control of the province, the Creole elite designed an action plan whose basic components were in accordance to its ideology, its economic interests, and especially its manifest weakness. What is fascinating is that, while they condemned the Quito uprising to ingratiate themselves with the Cadiz Regency, Cartagena’s Creoles were willing to copy the arguments of Quito’s Junta to the letter.

94  Cartagena’s struggle for political autonomy They did not act with the determination and transparency of the Creoles from Caracas. Quite the opposite. Their action plan consisted of: 1) combating the Spanish authorities of the viceroyalty and the province while they swore fidelity to the Spanish nation with unparalleled enthusiasm; 2) taking over and exercising the economic governance and internal administration of the province, rejecting any interference from Santa Fe in their decisions; 3) postponing as much as possible the decision to become independent from Spain, while they awaited the denouement of the war with France and the chances of negotiating with the Spanish government; 4) creating a solid alliance with the Spanish merchant elite based on the defense of “the king, religion, and the fatherland” and the struggle against Santa Fe; 5) achieving all of these changes peacefully, protecting as much as possible the principle of authority, which they would soon embody, and “civilized” ways of doing politics. In addition to José Ignacio de Pombo and Antonio de Narváez, the most important political player among Cartagena’s elites in the events that developed beginning in 1810 was the lawyer José María García de Toledo. No one better embodied the ambitions and weaknesses of this Caribbean aristocracy in the intense and troubled phase of the first independence than García de Toledo. He was its unquestionable leader, and he had the merit of constructing the moderate policies of the city’s reformist and liberal elites. Born in Cartagena, he came from one of the most powerful families in the viceroyalty. His father, the Spaniard José García, was accountant of the Inquisition Tribunal of Cartagena for many years. His mother, María Isabel de Madariaga, owned many possessions inherited from her father, Andrés de Madariaga, Count of Pestagua. One of her sisters was married to Joaquín de Mosquera, the powerful bureaucrat who was a member of the Council of the Indies in Madrid during the war of the colonies. Like most enlightened Creoles of his generation, García de Toledo studied law at Colegio de Rosario in Santa Fe and was considered one of the most outstanding lawyers in the city. He owned large cattle ranches and sugarcane haciendas, and during the years of acute political crisis, he lived off his production of spirits, which generated very significant profits. In spite of the prevailing instability, García de Toledo earned 200,000 pesos per year from the sale of spirits. By 1809, he had already held several of the most important positions in the province. Among them, he had been attorney of the general command office, ordinary city mayor, and member of the board of directors of the Consulado de Comercio from 1803 to 1806. In 1809, he was elected representative of the province in the Spanish Cortes. In 1812, at the age forty-​three, he was almost blind and suffered from gout pains in the legs, which forced him to take long rests.32 From early 1810 to the declaration of Independence in November 1811, he astutely led the policy of compromise and moderation with Spain, which allowed him and other members of the Creole elites to take over Cartagena’s government in alliance with the Spanish merchants. Aware that Governor Francisco Montes was the only obstacle left

Cartagena’s struggle for political autonomy  95 for the council to take over the government of the province, García Toledo planned his ousting.33 Brigadier Francisco Montes arrived in Cartagena on October 1809, during the conflict between that city’s council and the viceroy. The dossier of the port’s opening to the United States allowed him to perceive the extent to which the actions of two powerful aristocrats, Field Marshal Antonio de Narváez and the Consulado’s director, José I. de Pombo, had united all sectors of the elites, including the military. In April 1810, his profound distrust of the Creoles was evident, as well as his determination to destroy their already fragile alliance with the Spaniards.34 On May 22, 1810, the council decided to act against Governor Montes in the midst of street rumors skillfully incited by the Creoles that he favored the French. He was accused of not providing for Cartagena’s security appropriately in order to hand the stronghold over to the French and, in addition, unbelievably, of attempting to destroy the harmony in place between the city’s Creoles and Spaniards. Apparently, Montes had ordered the creation of a regiment of patrician Spaniards, which excluded Creoles. On the other hand, his secretary, Francisco Merlano, had been caught distributing clandestine pamphlets to warn the Spaniards of the Creoles’ intention of separating Cartagena from Spain. In the May sessions, it was determined that Montes was to share the government with the council and, to that effect, it appointed Antonio de Narváez and the wealthy Spanish merchant Tomás de la Torre, member of the council and former head of the Consulado de Comercio, as governors. In other words, claiming more zeal in the city’s defense, the council constrained the governor to the position of not being able to do anything without its authorization. Lacking support from the military, Brigadier Montes accepted the council’s decision, but with no intention of complying with it. This was of course what García de Toledo expected. A few weeks after the co-​government was imposed, García de Toledo himself, in his position as representative of the province before the Cortes of Cadiz, accused the governor of noncompliance with the agreements established with the council and requested his removal from office. On June 14, 1810, with the support of the large merchants and top Spanish military officers, Cartagena’s council made the unanimous decision to oust Governor Montes and send him to Spain. It then appointed as the new governor the Spanish military officer Blas de Soria, a man with a weak nature, and reserved the right to overrule his decisions. In other words, the council became the true power in the province. As was to be expected, the coup against Montes and the viceroy’s authority took place in the name of the defense “of the king, religion, and the fatherland.” The council reaffirmed its obedience to the Cadiz Regency. Curiously, no one stood out in the council’s sessions for his attacks against the governor as much as the Consulado’s former director, Tomás de la Torre, a wealthy Spaniard and, let us recall, an old-​time smuggler.35

96  Cartagena’s struggle for political autonomy The alliance with the Spanish continued to bear fruit, in particular, Cartagena’s much coveted political autonomy. On July 10, 1810, almost one month after Montes’s deposal, the representative of the Cortes of Cadiz, García de Toledo, sent a letter to Viceroy Amar in the most arrogant terms. In it, García de Toledo bitterly complained that the viceroy was not sending the money due to Cartagena, accumulating a deficit of 900,000 pesos. He observed, “It is most surprising that, while the money is not employed to defend this stronghold, which is the kingdom’s antemural, battalions are created in the interior and the disciplined militias of this stronghold are taken to Santa Fe.” Finally, he informed him that the council had been forced to “take the reins of the government” to guarantee Cartagena’s defense against a possible French invasion. He concluded the letter citing the famous paragraph of the declaration by the Regency’s Council: “The fate of this province no longer depends on the ministers, the viceroys, or the governors, because it is in the hands of the former.” “The former” referred to the representatives of the Spanish Cortes, like himself. In other words, García de Toledo concluded by telling the viceroy that the fate of the province of Cartagena was no longer in his hands but in García de Toledo’s.36 The deposal of Cartagena’s governor had very serious consequences for the political history of the independence of the Americas. First, it triggered the entire viceroyalty’s rebellion and the viceroy’s expulsion. What Amar y Borbón apparently never understood, Santa Fe’s Creole elite was perfectly clear about. The capital’s uprising could not occur as long as Cartagena’s government was in the hands of Spanish authorities, for the simple reason that, with the support of the port’s forces, the viceroy could easily subdue the insurgents. Therefore, once they learned about the governor’s deposal, the Creoles of Santa Fe’s council and of most of the kingdom started to prepare the revolt. July 20, 1810, the day when Santa Fe’s council took over the capital’s government, was a direct consequence of the events of June 14 in Cartagena.37 Second, the events in Cartagena, together with the revolts in Caracas, led to a change in the attitude of the Spanish government and the Cadiz liberal intelligentsia toward the colonies’ political movements. The pragmatism of Cartagena’s merchants clashed with that of the Cadis merchants. For the latter, saving Spain, which appeared to be collapsing definitively, was more important than their liberal principles. In order to do so, silver from the Americas was essential, and most of it came from Mexico and Peru. For that reason, for the Spanish, forming an alliance with the powerful conservative aristocracies of those two viceroyalties was much more important than an alliance with Cartagena, which would not only be a burden to the king’s cause, but would also need to be sustained. The Regency Council therefore considered it necessary to put an end to its liberal declarations and started to condemn any attempt at reform by the Creoles in the strongest terms. It rejected Brigadier Montes’s deposal and appointed a new governor, Brigadier Francisco Dávila. With this decision, Spain itself destroyed the

Cartagena’s struggle for political autonomy  97 alliance between Cartagena’s Creole and Spanish merchants, and led the Creole elite to radicalize the movement against its will.38 V The creation of governments in Cartagena and Santa Fe that were de facto independent inaugurated a new phase of the conflict between these two cities: the republican phase. Its evolution is the most eloquent evidence of the weakness and the complete failure of the incipient national discourse. It is of vital importance to stop to examine here the presumed origins of the “foolish fatherland,” the moment when, according to Restrepo, “the patriots were possessed by the genie of evil.”39 On July 20, 1810, the foundation statutes of the Supreme Governing Junta of Santa Fe were signed, which established that the said junta would govern the kingdom provisionally while it elaborated a constitution that guaranteed the public well-​being, counting with the noble provinces, which would be requested to appoint representatives who would develop electoral regulations in those provinces; and the foundations of both those regulations and the government’s constitution should be the provinces’ freedom and independence, bound only by a federal system whose representation would be established in the capital to guarantee the security of New Granada.40 Viceroy Amar and the judges of the Royal Audiencia were removed from office and imprisoned following the July 20 uprising in response to the people’s demands. Immediately, the Supreme Junta of Santa Fe, composed of the most select members of the Creole aristocracy, declared its independence from the government of Spain’s Regency Council, but maintained a vague loyalty to the king, since the monarchical feeling was still quite strong. Without wasting time, it sent two bulletins to Cartagena requesting that the port disclaim Spain’s Regency and inviting the provincial juntas to send their representatives to compose a provisional government in Santa Fe.41 Among the most influential men in the capital’s new government were the merchant José Acevedo y Gómez, who only six years earlier had written the petition to the viceroy to create a Consulado de Comercio in the capital, where he clearly expressed his radical opposition to Cartagena’s merchants; Manuel Bernardo Álvarez, who only a few days before the viceroy’s ousting was one of his most influential advisers in matters of commerce and had adopted the hardest positions against Cartagena in the Tribunal Mayor y Real Audiencia de Cuentas; José María Domínguez, son of the powerful Spanish landowner and merchant Francisco Domínguez, who headed the opposition to the merchants from the coast and was a nephew of Gregorio Domínguez, accountant of the Tribunal de Cuentas; Jorge Tadeo Lozano, son of the first Marquis of San Jorge, perhaps the most powerful landowner of the province of Santa Fe, enemy of Cartagena’s Consulado de Comercio, and nephew of Manuel Bernardo Álvarez; the merchant

98  Cartagena’s struggle for political autonomy Antonio Nariño, son of a former member of the Tribunal de Cuentas and also Álvarez’s nephew; Luis E. Azuola, son of the Spanish aristocrat Luis E. Azuola y Rocha, former general treasurer of the Holy Crusade and former ordinary mayor of Santa Fe, relative of the Álvarezes through his marriage with the sister of Manuel García Olano, who was in turn married to a sister of Manuel Bernardo Álvarez; and Ignacio de Herrera y Vergara, son of the Spanish aristocrat Manuel de Herrera, step-​nephew of Nariño and one of his unconditional followers in his struggle against the provinces. All of these Creoles, with the exception of Nariño, who was in Cartagena, were members of the Supreme Junta of Santa Fe de Bogotá that sent the bulletins in late July.42 In 1810, Cartagena’s council was mainly composed of merchants, sons of merchants, and landowners of the Consulado de Comercio, and their main advisers were José Ignacio de Pombo and Antonio Narváez. No one should therefore be surprised that this body responded to the bulletins issued by Santa Fe’s government with the September 19 declaration, which invited all provinces to send their representatives not to Santa Fe de Bogotá but to the city of Santa Fe de Antioquia or to the town of Medellín; it proposed that one representative should be elected per 50,000 inhabitants instead of one per province; and finally, it requested the Congress to decide whether it would continue being governed by Spain’s Regency, observing that Cartagena’s council was in principle in favor of remaining under the orders of that peninsular body.43 Obviously, the last thing that the Creole/​Spanish elite of Cartagena was willing to accept was the establishment of a central government in Santa Fe under the influence of that city’s Supreme Junta, even if it was provisional and even if it was made up of provincial representatives. In addition, not only for the Spanish merchants but also for the Creoles of Cartagena, it was interesting to negotiate with Spanish liberalism in a political relation that, without becoming independent from Spain, would give them enough autonomy to manage their internal affairs. A political relation whose essence, as the declaration expressed it, would be to “guarantee the principle of absolute equality of rights granted to America, including the right to self-​government through Juntas, like those of Spain’s provinces.”44 They could not have been any clearer. The declaration expressed the main political objective of Cartagena’s elites: not to destruct but to reform the colonial political relationship, to guarantee that America’s provinces enjoyed the same rights as the Spanish ones—​that is, self-​government, a direct relation with Spain, and the elimination of a central colonial government. In the particular case of New Granada, this meant nothing less than destroying Santa Fe as the center of power. After all, the Consulado’s men were convinced that the reason they had been unable to progress at the same pace as Havana or Caracas was Santa Fe’s senseless politics, and not Madrid’s, and as late as 1810, the most powerful sector of the Creole elite (including Pombo, Narváez, García de Toledo, and Ayos) sincerely believed that it could reach an agreement with the Cadiz liberals. Of course, in a few months, the latter destroyed all hope of such

Cartagena’s struggle for political autonomy  99 an agreement with the dictatorial policies they adopted against the American colonies. Nariño, who was still in Cartagena, was commissioned by the Supreme Junta of Santa Fe to write a response to the September 19 declaration. In it, among the many arguments offered to keep the capital as the seat of the interim government, composed of representatives from the provinces, he said: The center of enlightenment and power has always been in one place in every land; and never has it been thought that the influx of enlightenment has harmed either the form of government or the provinces’ interest. What could be the reason, then, for Santa Fe, the kingdom’s capital, to be the exception to this general rule so closely tied to reason?45 For Colombian traditional historiography, and apparently even for the most recent one, Cartagena’s September 19 declaration was the seed of the feud between the provinces and hence of the subsequent political calamities.46 The historian José Manuel Restrepo, who in 1827 wrote the first comprehensive history of the struggles for independence in Colombian territory, which is still unsurpassed and a direct source of almost everything that has been written later on the topic, said with an evident antipathy toward the Colombian Caribbean: Cartagena’s Junta initiated the division; because of the stronghold’s importance and the multitude of military elements it contained, it had great aspirations and looked upon Santa Fe as the capital with envy, as subsequent events demonstrated. Driven by those motives, it sent all the provinces a declaration, dated September 19 […] Cartagena’s declaration entirely paralyzed the call to the provincial representatives to meet in Santa Fe, to which almost all juntas had responded positively. The only chance of establishing a government worthy of that name, which would have maintained the union, was thus lost. Inebriated with the gratifying idea of a federation proposed by Cartagena, suggested since the creation of the Supreme Junta of Santa Fe, and seduced with the example of the United States of America, they no longer considered sending representatives to Santa Fe or maintaining a central government […] That September 19 declaration greatly harmed New Granada […] it lay the foundations for the rivalry between Cartagena and Santa Fe, a rivalry that was the hapless origin of discords.47 This has been the traditional interpretation of the origin of the mishaps of the first independence, reiterated by all historians who have studied that period.48 However, this consensus has been built on a false assumption: that what occurred before July 20, 1810, between the Caribbean and the Andean elites is not relevant to the analysis of the events that took place in the “new era” inaugurated on that date. For that reason, for Restrepo and all other Colombian historians, the

100  Cartagena’s struggle for political autonomy origin of the disagreements and the failure to build a nation-​state are found in the events and ideas that took place after July 20, that is, in the sequence declaration–​ federalism–​ division between Santa Fe and Cartagena. This methodological stance has served quite well to conceal the obvious continuities between the Colony and the Republic, not only in terms of social and cultural structures, but also of men of flesh and blood and their control over the instruments of power. The first thing that seems evident regarding the origins of the “foolish fatherland” is that the “rivalry between Cartagena and Santa Fe” did not begin with the declaration. As has been demonstrated, the conflict between these two cities not only had its roots in the Colony, but was also the immediate cause of rebellion by Cartagena’s elite against the viceroy, months before Santa Fe initiated its own. Second, the declaration was merely a logical consequence of a fact that historians have overlooked: for all practical effects, Cartagena had split from New Granada the moment Governor Montes was ousted. It could therefore not accept Santa Fe’s proposal of becoming “the center of reason and power,” when all of its efforts were mainly focused on destroying that center. In other words, the initial efforts by Cartagena’s elites against the viceroy of Santa Fe were not intended to replace the viceroy with a nation to be built, but to obtain its own political and economic autonomy. Whether such autonomy was to be obtained by negotiating with Spain or through independence would be decided as events developed. Third, Cartagena’s acceptance of federalism could not have yet been the reason for profound disagreements. Santa Fe was the first province to propose a federal government system in its proclamation on July 20. Its recently constituted Supreme Junta was not yet dominated by the Álvarez-​Nariño family group, which would soon take power, as their parents had done for most of the eighteenth century, and would impose the defense of a dogmatic centralism.49 VI The later clash between centralists and federalists was merely the ideological disguise behind which the old colonial struggle continued, now through other means: the regional elites’ struggle to conquer their autonomy and to control the provinces, in clear opposition to the old tendency to build a central government in the eastern Andes. Subsequent events would demonstrate the inconsistency of those ideas and the evident primacy of the material interests of those elites. As a result of Cartagena’s opposition to the creation of an interim government in Santa Fe and the subsequent refusal by the latter to consider the possibility of establishing it in a different city, each province started to manage its affairs autonomously. The idea of creating a republican state composed of the provinces recently liberated from New Granada had little chance of becoming a reality. However, the importance of military defense prompted them to undertake new attempts at organization, since the consolidation of the royalists in the

Cartagena’s struggle for political autonomy  101 government of two provinces as important as Santa Marta and Popayán, and their control of the coastal cities of Maracaibo, Guayaquil, and Riohacha were most worrisome. In December 1810, after the failure of its call in July, Santa Fe’s government decided to create its own congress without the presence of the large provinces of Cartagena, Popayán, Antioquia, and Tunja. The congress began operating on December 22 with the participation of representatives from the provinces of Mariquita, Neiva, Socorro, Nóvita, and Pamplona, all of them in the eastern Andean region. This small congress of Santa Fe representatives was declared “the keeper of national sovereignty,” with Manuel Bernardo Álvarez as president and Antonio Nariño as secretary. Unable to foster a single action conducive to uniting the provinces, the congress was dissolved due to the clash between the centralist and the federalist parties. But its dissolution was not caused by a discussion of theoretical principles, but rather—​who would have believed it?—​by the centralists’ decision to admit into the congress representatives from places that had split from their provinces and had declared themselves autonomous. The goal was to stimulate the breakup of the large provinces that had welcomed federalism. The life of this assembly, holder of “national sovereignty,” lasted no more than two months.50 The next congress of the provinces met in Santa Fe a few months after the previous one failed. Delegates from Cartagena, Antioquia, Pamplona, Tunja, Neiva, Casanare, El Socorro, Santa Fe, and Chocó attended. When the majority of the congress decided to create a confederation, the delegates from Santa Fe and Chocó, Manuel Álvarez and Ignacio Herrera, expressed their disagreement and opposed its creation. On November 27, 1811, the representatives from the provinces of Cartagena, Antioquia, Tunja, Pamplona, and Neiva signed the agreement whereby the confederation was created, with the name United Provinces of New Granada. The confederation’s government was headquartered in the small city of Ibagué, where its role was limited to “elaborating communications to the provincial governments.”51 In 1812, the setbacks suffered by the Creoles in Venezuela and Popayán, and the arrival in Panama of the new viceroy of New Granada, Brigadier Benito Pérez, appointed by the Regency of Spain, led to new talks between the confederation of provinces and the dictatorial government of Santa Fe, now in the hands of Nariño. When everything indicated that an agreement would finally be reached, whereby Nariño would join the rest of the provinces, it was once again frustrated due to an obstacle that clearly demonstrates the true nature of the conflict between federalists and centralists. Since the beginning of the discussions with the confederation, Nariño had argued that Mariquita, Neiva, Tunja, El Socorro, and Pamplona belonged to the province of Santa Fe, now called Cundinamarca. In other words, he was attempting to place the entire eastern Andean region under the capital’s direct dominion. To this end, he employed the legal argument that these administrative entities had been townships that

102  Cartagena’s struggle for political autonomy depended on Santa Fe during the Colony, even though he knew better than anyone that they had been operating as independent provinces for many years. Guided by that ambition, he subjugated Socorro by force and took over the towns of Neiva, Chiquinquirá, and Muzo, which belonged to the province of Tunja. When signing the agreement, the congress, which knew that Tunja was preparing for war against Santa Fe, stated that it could not acknowledge the legitimacy of the former annexations if they were not accepted by Tunja. Nariño called off the agreement with the congress and prepared for war with the neighboring province,52 so that this war between federalists and centralists had nothing to do with political beliefs, but rather with the ambitions of the Creoles of Santa Fe of expanding their territory to the detriment of that of Tunja. The behavior of New Granada’s elites, whether centralists or federalists, remained the same until the defeat of the first republic: they were more interested in defending the provinces’ interests than in building a nation-​state.53 The fact that the Andes became an arena for war between Santa Fe and the provinces and for innumerable uprisings by smaller settlements against their capitals was impossible to avoid after the divisions that arose in September 1810. Nonetheless, there was nothing foolish or childish about it and, in my opinion, it was perfectly understandable. The tradition of political autonomy practiced by the provincial governments was much older than the recent Bourbon innovations to impose a centralized government. The Viceroyalty of New Granada, differently from those of Mexico and Peru, not only had been established less than a century earlier, but its creation was mainly motivated by an interest in putting an end to provincial autonomy, whose roots went back to the Conquest. The viceroy’s authority was not in the least accepted as natural and consolidated as a result of its remote origin, as was the case with the great viceroyalties of Mexico and Peru. To make things worse, the enlightened viceroys of New Granada faced such adverse conditions that, instead of centralizing power, they demonstrated the impossibility of doing so. Thus, with Viceroy Amar y Borbón ousted, Santa Fe had no hegemony over the rest of the provinces, and its attempts to impose itself forcefully failed the moment that Cartagena, which held the military power in the viceroyalty, opposed it decisively. The Confederation’s attempts to create a nation-​state also failed because the strongest regional elites, such as those from Cartagena, were never truly willing to create a federal government above those of the provinces, with the necessary instruments to act with power. In early 1814, Fernández de Madrid described in New Granada’s Argos, a newspaper that defended the interests of the provinces, the ineffectiveness of the confederate government, demonstrating that the union was only a fiction and that each state functioned independently, and that the executive power had no army, no treasury, and no force whatsoever, physical or moral, to enforce obedience. The Confederation’s government elaborated many

Cartagena’s struggle for political autonomy  103 laws, organized regulations, and issued innumerable decrees, but was unable to coordinate even the kingdom’s defense.54 In 1814, the government of the provinces, now headquartered in Tunja, made a last attempt to unite with Santa Fe. The situation had become dramatic for Cartagena and the rest of the provinces that had declared absolute independence from Spain in the last two years. In Caracas, Simón Bolívar’s armies were being exterminated by Boves’s soldiers in a brutal war, and in Spain, Ferdinand VII had returned to the throne. However, in spite of the imminence of a Spanish attack against New Granada, these new attempts at uniting with Santa Fe once again failed. Nariño had been defeated in the south, and in Cundinamarca, Manuel Bernardo Álvarez reigned as a dictator. The Congress had committed itself to respect Santa Fe’s territorial possessions, its Mint House, and its weapons. However, the dictator Álvarez rejected any attempt at uniting with the provinces that did not guarantee that half of the confederation’s authority would be in his hands.55 The negotiations between the provinces and Cundinamarca’s dictatorial government were enmeshed in a labyrinth of small details, until force imposed itself as the only solution. The provinces’ army, led by Simón Bolívar, who had fled Caracas again, and strengthened by the incorporation of a group of Venezuelan soldiers, veterans of the war to death, finally subdued Santa Fe with blood and fire. This war became atrocious due to the fanaticism of the capital’s priests. According to Restrepo, “some of them […] appeared on the streets and plazas preaching war, devastation, and revenge; they portrayed General Bolívar and the Confederation’s troops as ungodly heretics […] Many priests of the various denominations […] appeared armed, offering to fight to death in the war.”56 In August 1815, the Spanish general Pablo Morillo led his expeditionary forces against Cartagena. By then, the powerful Creole elites of Santa Fe and Cartagena had destroyed all chances of creating a nation-​state by taking their old colonial conflict and the defense of their own interests to extreme levels. Defeat was inevitable. Notes 1 See “Carta de José A. de Ayos y José M. Revollo al rey,” December 1809, and “Decreto del 4 de julio de 1809 del virrey Amar y Borbón,” AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 745. 2 In 1807, Cartagena’s council sent a first report on the shortage of foodstuffs in the province to Viceroy Amar. See Expediente sobre la escasez de víveres, 1808, in AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 745. 3 “Expediente de víveres traídos del Sinú a Cartagena, 1808” and “Testimonios de hacendados y panaderos sobre escasez de víveres, 1808,” in AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 745. 4 “Decreto del 13 de Julio de 1809 del virrey Amar y Borbón,” in AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 745. 5 “Expediente sobre escasez de víveres, 1809,” in AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 745. 6 Intervención del síndico procurador José A. de Ayos en el cabildo del 11 de agosto de 1809, in AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 745.

104  Cartagena’s struggle for political autonomy 7 Oficio del Tribunal Mayor de Cuentas al virrey, June 21, 1809, and Decreto del 4 de julio de 1809 del virrey Amar y Borbón, in AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 745. 8 The regular army of New Granada had 3,573 soldiers. Cartagena alone had 1,673. See Allan J. Kuethe, Military Reform and Society in New Granada, 1773–​1808 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1978), p. 217. 9 Timothy E. Anna, Spain and the Loss of America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), pp. 24–​43. On England’s financial contribution to the Spanish army, see “Noticias,” in Semanario Patriótico, n. 49 (Cádiz, September 1808). 10 Jesús Henao and Gerardo Arrubla, Historia de Colombia (Bogotá: Academia Colombiana de Historia, 1912), pp. 316–​319. 11 See “Expediente sobre escasez de víveres en Cartagena, 1809.” 12 The Spanish merchants were Santiago González, José Casamayor, Juan Vicente Romero Campo, Lázaro Herrera, José Antonio Fernández, Francisco García del Fierro, and Mauricio Martín García. The Creole merchants were Santiago Lecuna and Juan de Dios Amador. The Creole lawyers were José M. del Castillo y Rada, José A. de Ayos, Germán Gutiérrrez de Piñeres, and José M. Benito Revollo. Juan Salvador Narváez and José A. de Madariaga were landowners. See “Expediente sobre escasez de víveres, 1808.” 13 Reunión del cabildo de Cartagena del 12 de agosto de 1810, in Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 “Oficio de Antonio Narváez al gobernador Blas de Soria,” September 3, 1809, and “Oficio de José I. de Pombo al gobernador Blas de Soria,” September 19, 1809, AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 745. 17 “Decreto del gobernador Soria del 28 de septiembre de 1809,” in AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 745. 18 Informe del gobernador Francisco Montes al virrey sobre el permiso a barcos de Estados Unidos, February 1, 1810, AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 745. 19 See “Oficio del Tribunal Mayor de Cuentas de Santa Fe al virrey, del 21 de junio de 1809.” 20 José M. Restrepo Sáenz and Raimundo Rivas, Genealogías de Santa Fe de Bogotá (Bogotá: Librería Colombiana, 1929), pp. 313–​319. 21 Ibid., pp. 17–​21 22 John Leddy Phelan, “El auge y la caída de los criollos en la Audiencia de Nueva Granada, 1700–​1781,” in Boletín de Historia y Antigüedades, vol. 59 (Bogotá: Academia Colombiana de Historia, 1972), pp. 597–​618. 23 Restrepo Sáenz and Rivas, Genealogías de Santa Fe de Bogotá, p. 21. 24 Ibid.; Henao and Arrubla, Historia de Colombia, pp. 325–​430. 25 Phelan, “El auge y la caída,” p. 615. 26 Anna, Spain and the Loss of America, p. 60; José Manuel Restrepo, Historia de la Revolución (repr. Bogotá: Talleres Gráficos, 1942–​1950), vol. I, pp. 79–​80. 27 Manuel Ezequiel Corrales, Documentos para la historia de la provincia de Cartagena de Indias, hoy Estado Soberano de Bolívar en la Unión colombiana (Bogotá: Imprenta de Medrano Rivas, 1883), vol. I, p. 39. 28 John Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808–​1826 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), pp. 194–​195. 29 Restrepo, Historia de la Revolución, vol. I, pp. 69–​72.

Cartagena’s struggle for political autonomy  105 3 0 Ibid., pp. 78–​88. 31 Gabriel Jiménez Molinares, Los mártires de Cartagena de 1816 ante el consejo de guerra y ante la historia (Cartagena: Imprenta Departamental, 1947), pp. 51–​58. 32 On José María García de Toledo, see Roberto Arrázola, “Confesión y alegato de José M. García de Toledo,” in Los mártires responden (Cartagena: Tipografía Hernández, 1973), pp. 9–​34; “Defensa hecha por el señor José M. García de Toledo de su conducta pública y privada, contra los autores de la conmoción del 11 y 12 del presente mes,” in Corrales, Documentos, vol. I, pp. 364–​411; Mario León Echeverría, Semblanza del prócer y mártir José M. García de Toledo (Cartagena, 1976); Gabriel Jiménez Molinares, Linajes cartageneros (Cartagena, 1958), pp. 3–​60; “Correspondencia con José M. García de Toledo,” in Noticia biográfica del prócer don Joaquín Camacho, ed. Luis Martínez Delgado (Bogotá: Editorial Pax, 1954), pp. 239–​259. 33 Jiménez Molinares, Los mártires, vol. I, pp. 75–​120. 34 “Oficios cambiados entre los señores gobernador de Cartagena y alcaldes ordinarios, sobre los temores de una subversión del orden,” May 15 and 16, 1810, in Corrales, Documentos, vol. I, pp. 65–​66. 35 A very detailed and well-​documented description of the conflict between Cartagena’s council and Governor Montes can be found in Jiménez Molinares, Los mártires, vol. I, pp. 96–​120. 36 “Representación que el doctor don José M. García de Toledo, como diputado a las Cortes de España, dirige al virrey don Antonio Amar,” July 10, 1810, in Corrales, Documentos, vol. I, pp. 116–​118. 37 “Defensa hecha por el señor José M. de Toledo, de su conducta pública y privada.” November 30, 1811, in Corrales, Documentos, vol. I, p. 389. 38 “Alocución de la Junta Suprema de Cartagena de Indias, con motivo del nombramiento hecho por la Regencia en el brigadier D. José Dávila, para gobernador de la plaza y su provincia,” November 9, 1810, and “Detención en los castillos de Bocachica del brigadier D. José Dávila,” November 29, 1810, in Efemérides y Anales del Estado de Bolívar, comp. Manuel Ezequiel Corrales (Bogotá: Casa Editorial de J. J. Pérez, 1889), vol. II, pp. 26–​34. 39 Restrepo, Historia de la Revolución, vol. I, p. 107. 40 Ibid., p. 101. 41 Ibid., p. 107; “Exposición que la Junta de la Provincia de Cartagena de Indias hace a las demás de la Nueva Granada, relativa al lugar en que convendría se reunirse el Congreso general,” September 19, 1810, in Corrales, Documentos, vol. I, p. 154. 42 Restrepo, Historia de la Revolución, vol. I, p. 106; Banco de la República, Próceres, 1810 (Bogotá: Imprenta del Banco de la República, 1960), pp. 35–​45 and 65–​73. 43 “Exposición que la Junta de la provincia de Cartagena hace a las demás de la Nueva Granada.” 44 Ibid., p. 162. 45 “Reflexiones al manifiesto de la Junta de Cartagena, sobre el proyecto de establecer el Congreso supremo en la villa de Medellín, comunicado a esta Suprema provisional,” September 1810, in Corrales, Documentos, vol. I, p. 171. 46 Anthony McFarlane, Colombia before Independence: Economy, Society and Politics under Bourbon Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 345; Konig, En el camino hacia la nación, pp. 191–​193. 47 Restrepo, Historia de la Revolución, vol. I, pp. 116–​118. Emphasis is mine.

106  Cartagena’s struggle for political autonomy 4 8 See, for example, Henao and Arrubla, Historia de Colombia, pp. 337–​338. 49 See Restrepo, Historia de la Revolución, vol. I, pp. 194–​199. 50 Ibid., pp. 122–​123. 51 Ibid., pp. 164–​166. 52 Ibid., pp. 198–​202. 53 A detailed account of the conflict between Santa Fe and the congress of the provinces is found in Restrepo, Historia de la Revolución, vols. I–​III. 54 Ibid., vol. II, pp. 153–​154. 55 Ibid., pp. 155–​163. 56 Ibid., p. 175.

6 Black and mulatto artisans and the independence of the Republic of Cartagena, 1810–​1816

I On February 10, 1811, Manuel Trinidad Noriega, officer of the mulatto militias and lifetime dependent of the powerful Spanish merchant Francisco Bustamante, wrote a letter to his boss, who was in Santa Fe at the time, narrating in detail the events in Cartagena during the people’s rebellion against the Spanish on February 4 and 5. One of the paragraphs read as follows: February 5 was a day of horror and fright. The streets full of people searching for the accomplices of the “Fixed” [Regiment] uprising, who were said to be all Europeans. Aviles was practically dragged from his home; Pardo, González’s dependent, was pushed out; [D. Tomás] Torres’s house was the most offended, for they knocked down the doors and he was forced to flee over the fence. The same happened to Llamas, and he was imprisoned; to D. Juan de Francisco likewise; to Trava and, in short, to everyone. Doomsday, it seemed; the fury was unbridled.1 Once Governor Montes was ousted, what happened in Cartagena with the alliance between the Creole and Spanish elites, which had been solid up to that time and which concerned Nariño so much with the possibility of the stronghold falling into the empire’s hands? What new actors came onto the scene and to what extent did they influence the events? How was it possible that the Spaniards, who controlled commerce, owned innumerable enslaved people, and were accustomed to governing the city for centuries, were persecuted by crowds of Blacks, mulattos, and Zambos armed with sticks and machetes? What was this “unbridled fury”? In 1809, Pombo had warned Santa Fe’s authorities of the dangers of a people’s uprising in Cartagena.2 Viceroy Amar and the Creoles who advised him assumed that the warning was one more excuse deployed by Cartagena smugglers to get their way, so they turned a deaf ear.3 However, the fact is that the situation for the lower classes was becoming dire. Not only was there insufficient food since 1807 and basic foodstuffs had become more expensive, but legal commerce was DOI: 10.4324/9781003381198-7

108  Black and mulatto artisans and the independence of the Republic in a state of extreme decay. To make things worse, since the first years of the new century, it was evident that Santa Marta was beginning to replace Cartagena in the contraband business. With the coast guard strengthened in Cartagena, it became easier to smuggle illegal goods through Santa Marta.4 In addition, it was easier for the great smugglers from Mompox to control the Santa Marta route, excluding Cartagenan smugglers, and to make things worse, the decaying relations between Cartagena and the other Andean provinces, increasingly discontent with the policy of sending their surplus to the stronghold, had interrupted the flow of money to some extent. Without that money, public works stopped. Construction of defensive walls, forts, and breakwaters was interrupted, increasing unemployment in the city. Hundreds of day laborers and artisans wandered jobless through the streets of Cartagena, to the point that Pombo proposed giving them land and privileges to turn them into small peasants.5 In 1809, Cartagena’s elites accused Santa Fe’s authorities of all of the above. Eager to break with Santa Fe, as they eventually did, the port’s Creole leaders began cultivating the people’s support. Introducing flour freely to lower the price of bread for the lower classes became one of its favorite mottos. During most of the previous eleven years, Cartagena had been governed by Field Marshal Anastasio Zejudo, a career military officer who had been living in the stronghold since a very young age as an officer of the Fixed Regiment.6 Zejudo had lived there long enough to become familiar with the dynamics of some elites who depended on the money sent from other provinces and the illegal trade. In contrast, Governor Francisco Montes had recently arrived in the city in October 1809, and had the misfortune of arriving in the midst of Spain’s political crisis and the declared conflict between Cartagena’s council and the viceroy. Apparently clumsy and with a weak character, he soon earned the animosity of two key sectors: the military and the people. Montes made the decision to reduce military expenses, and to that end, he sent two battalions to Bogotá, suspended public works, and reduced security measures.7 It was therefore not difficult for the Creoles to convince Blacks and mulattos, most of whom depended on military investments for their subsistence, of the need to support the movement against Montes. The political goal of obtaining the city’s autonomy was compounded by very concrete motivations of material survival.8 In the coup against the governor on June 14, 1810, the Creole elites made a conscious effort to foster the participation of the popular sectors. That day, for the first time, the city’s subjects marched with arms to the government plaza to challenge the representative of viceregal power. Everything seems to indicate that this first act of organizing the people was conceived by the council’s leaders as a strategy to frighten Montes and force him to step down. Of course, they had no intention of triggering violent acts. The Creoles had the support of the army, most of whose members were American born, and whose highest-​ranking officer, Antonio de Narváez, was one of the leaders of the struggle against the governor.9

Black and mulatto artisans and the independence of the Republic  109 Only one of the contemporary narratives of the events of June 14 provides revealing details on the people’s participation in Montes’s downfall. Given its importance, it is worth transcribing the relevant parts in their entirety: Governor Montes was not as meticulous as he should have been in keeping his promise of loyalty to the council’s agreement […] this led the council to seriously consider removing him from office and sending him to Spain […] Several people were sought to approach the masses and prepare them for the ultimate measures that had to be adopted. Mr. Juan José Solano and Mr. Pedro Romero were in charge of approaching a large number of courageous and resolute men in the neighborhood of Getsemaní and preparing them to respond to García de Toledo’s first call. Mr. Pedro Romero saw himself in the most difficult quandary. His subsistence and that of his large family practically depended on his work in one of the Arsenal’s auxiliary workshops, where he and some of his sons were employed. I learned that, after García de Toledo explained the plan of ousting Montes, he considered it an impossible undertaking and the strangest thing that could be attempted against a representative of His Majesty. An honest man, educated in the most complete ignorance, as we all are, regarding the political relations that tied us to the metropolis, it was inevitable that he should marvel at such a project. But Romero’s support was important in the city: he was convinced of the project’s justice and was willing to cooperate with his influence, his goods, and his children. Thanks to his and Solano’s intervention, the entire neighborhood of Getsemaní committed itself to supporting any action by García de Toledo for the benefit of the homeland […] Likewise, other people were appointed for the same purpose in the neighborhoods of La Catedral and Santo Toribio. It was determined that on June 14, the day when the council was to meet, the deputies should have men armed with machetes ready, who should present themselves before the governor’s palace, which was the same place where the council held its meetings. It was done as planned […] The mayors described the deeds of which the governor was accused, and as a consequence, it was decided that he should be removed from office, arrested in the palace, and sent to Spain with the reasons that had motivated the procedure. Montes did not oppose any of this, nor was he in a position to issue a single order capable of preventing the events. He appeared in his office’s balcony and he was convinced that he could no longer uphold his authority or make any use of it. The people, in very large numbers and armed, had gathered around the palace, expressing their determination to support the council and its resolutions with their lives and possessions; they were no longer restrained by fear.10

110  Black and mulatto artisans and the independence of the Republic It is surprising that this anonymous witness’s account, published in Manuel Ezequiel Corrales’s well-​known collection of documents, was overlooked, in spite of the relevance of several of its arguments. From the above, we can see that Pedro Romero, a mulatto artisan born in Matanzas, Cuba, was already an important leader in the neighborhood of Getsemaní together with Solano, prior to the beginning of the Creole movement. Because of his importance, García de Toledo approached him. The two leaders agreed to build a political alliance to remove Montes, of which unfortunately we know no details. Was it solely based on the governor’s French proclivities and the threat his actions entailed for the city’s security? Or did more ambitious social considerations motivate Romero to risk his life and that of his children to put the city’s government in the council’s hands? It does not appear to be a mere coincidence that precisely Pedro Romero, only six months before Montes was ousted, requested the king to allow his son to attend the university even though he was a mulatto. In addition, the course of events demonstrated that social issues were of the utmost importance to mulattos. In this account, the people are not led to the plaza by the Creole leaders but rather by the mulatto leaders or envoys, after negotiating with the former. Large numbers of Blacks, mulattos, and Zambos armed with machetes made it clear to the governor that there was no point in resisting. Moreover, they must have had the same effect on some of the high-​ranking Spanish military officers, who did not dare pronounce themselves in favor of the governor. Thus, since the very beginning of the political movement for autonomy, the people were mobilized by their leaders, who acted in agreement with the Creole and Spanish elites—​an agreement that proved temporary, as we shall see later in this work. It must be emphasized that the neighborhood of Gersemaní was the largest in the city and had a significant population of mulatto and Black artisans. The vast majority were members of the mulatto militias and had some military training, hence their importance and no doubt the outstanding role they would play in the events toward independence. With Montes ousted, the council implemented two measures that would set the tone for the future course of Cartagena’s internal policies. The first was the creation of the patriot battalions composed of mulatto, Black, and White volunteers. The first one, known as Lancers of Getsemaní, was mainly composed of mulatto and Black artisans from that neighborhood, led by Pedro Romero, who had been promoted to colonel of the province’s armies. García de Toledo created these battalions to turn them into the trusted force of the Creole elite. With good reason, he feared that the highest-​ranking officers of the regular regiment, most of whom were Spanish, would clash with the council.11 The second measure was the establishment of the Supreme Governing Junta of Cartagena on August 14. This decision was in part a reaction to the creation of the Supreme Junta of Santa Fe on July 20, that is, a way of establishing a sovereign power in opposition to the one created in the capital city for the purpose of governing the provinces. The Junta’s creation also responded to the need to

Black and mulatto artisans and the independence of the Republic  111 concentrate power in a new body that, given its more democratic origins, would foster the people’s obedience and loyalty. Initially made up of the council’s members plus six members elected by Cartagena’s population and five by the other towns, the composition of the first Junta nonetheless reflected the exclusionary dominion of the Spanish and Creole elites.12 On June 14, the council appointed Colonel Blas de Soria, an old military officer who had been assistant to the two previous governors, as standing governor, replacing Francisco Montes. Therefore, the situation created was quite precarious. Together with the Junta that monopolized political power in the hands of the elites, a new, strong instrument of power emerged, led by a mulatto. Even though historiography has been indifferent to this fact, its significance is of the utmost importance. For the first time in the history of the stronghold of Cartagena, a mulatto of humble origins was put at the head of military forces that were essential to the maintenance of power. Their use came swiftly. II When the Spanish Regency learned of Montes’s ousting, it condemned the actions of Cartagena’s council in the harshest terms, accusing it of usurping the king’s authority, and appointed a new brigadier as governor—​the aristocrat and military officer José Dávila. The Creoles of the governing junta, supported by some Spaniards, had no other option but to confront the Regency Council. In a meeting on November 11, 1810, in the midst of a violent argument between Creoles and Spaniards, the Junta forbid Brigadier Dávila’s entry to the city. The volunteer battalion of Getsemaní was in charge of enforcing the decision with weapons. It guarded the Junta and was charged with surveilling the city for fifteen days, from November 11 to 25, during which Dávila remained in one of the castles outside of Cartagena.13 The rejection of the new governor sent by the Spanish Regency Council was a decisive event in the collapse of the alliance between Spaniards and Creoles. The clash this implied no longer with the viceroy, but with the metropolitan government itself, predisposed the peninsular elite to act against the Junta. The old governor Blas de Soria, frightened by the implications of the decision, resigned and requested a passport to go to Spain. The commander of the Fixed Regiment, Colonel José Castillo, and another large group of Spaniards, decided to travel to Santa Marta, where Governor Tomás de Acosta, upon learning of the events in Cartagena, took it upon himself to dismantle the Junta and reestablish Spain’s dominion.14 However, another very important group of Spanish military officers and merchants decided to remain in Cartagena with the intention of imitating the example of Santa Marta’s governor and returning the city’s control to the king. In late 1810, internal tensions had reached levels difficult to control in spite of the Creoles’ efforts to maintain order and peace in their revolution. Armed Blacks and mulattos had begun to attack Spaniards, and the junta was forced to publish

112  Black and mulatto artisans and the independence of the Republic a declaration on November 9, threatening anyone acting against Spaniards’ lives or properties with strong punishment. García de Toledo, president of the junta and the declaration’s author, said in one of its final paragraphs: This junta therefore recommends this generous neighborhood […] to live in peace and abandon the spirit of distrust, for it has been observed with pain that being a patriot, and patriotism itself, is understood as deriding, gossiping, and interpreting in the worst possible manner the most innocent actions of many honest Spaniards who have proven in many ways their love for the country and many of its natives. For that reason, the junta exhorts and commands everyone to abstain from a behavior so contrary to American justice and generosity; from now on, any complaint of such gossip, words, or actions aimed at falsely incriminating anyone, whether Spanish or American, shall be considered insubordination and shall be severely punished, for everyone has the right to the government’s protection.15 As was always the case in such instances, neither the threats nor the decrees were able to avoid the inevitable and violent confrontation, not between the Spanish and Creole elites, but between the former and the people. On December 11, 1810, the junta decided to reform itself, issuing to that effect a lengthy decree establishing that, as of January 1 of the following year, the provincial government would consist of a junta with only twelve members, and that these would be elected by the people through an indirect election system, and that in the meantime, the junta would be composed of the six members appointed by Cartagena, three from the towns, and the remaining three would be provisionally appointed by the junta itself. The final result was that, at the beginning of 1811, the provincial government was constituted by ten Creoles from Cartagena’s moderate elites, one Creole from Mompox, and only one Spaniard.16 The last day of 1810, in a most solemn manner, the junta recognized the Spanish Courts recently established in Isla de León, in spite of its profound disagreements with the Regency. By doing so, the Creoles once again expressed their hope of reaching an agreement with Spain based on the absolute equality between American and Spanish provinces, and of course their autonomy to manage the province’s internal affairs.17 If the Spaniards who remained in the city still had any doubts regarding the final fate of the relations between Cartagena and Spain, the composition of the previous junta demonstrated that the Creoles had snatched power away from them. In addition, the actions of mulattos and Blacks when Governor Dávila was rejected were becoming a real threat.18 For all of these reasons, and not only out of loyalty to Spain, on February 4, 1811, a group of Spanish merchants and high-​ranking military officers attempted to imprison the junta’s Creoles, to send them to Cádiz, and to reestablish the king’s government. Their strategy to do so depended entirely on the actions of the powerful regular regiment of

Black and mulatto artisans and the independence of the Republic  113 veteran troops stationed in Cartagena, as well as the complicity of the Spanish commanders of the White and mulatto militias. As is well known, the coup would have been successful, were it not for the decisive intervention of the enlightened Creole and field marshal Antonio de Narváez, who, using his military rank and his position as general commander of the province’s armies, forced the soldiers to return to their barracks.19 Quelling the military conspiracy did not appear to be very difficult, since the junta not only counted with Narváez but also with several high-​ranking officers. Although Spanish, the colonels Manuel Anguiano and Juan Eslava remained on the Creole’s side until the republic was dismantled in 1815.20 What was impossible to control during forty-​eight hours was the people’s violent reaction once the news spread that the Spanish merchants, allied to the regular army, were attempting to take over the government. In his account of the events of February 4, the mulatto Manuel Trinidad, lieutenant of the mulatto volunteer battalion, recounts that, at about four in the afternoon, people started to capture the Spanish merchants and military officers involved in the conspiracy on their own, and a short time later, a “fury of more than 400 men with spears, sables, machetes, axes, etc.” went to the house of the merchant Bustamante. “The imprisonments continued throughout the night,” he says, and “the whole night saw revolution: more than 3,000 souls were patrolling the streets, and it was the first time that the junta was seen meeting an entire day and night.” At seven in the morning the next day, “more than 200 armed Zambos” threatened Manuel Trinidad, demanding that he deliver Bustamante’s son-​in-​law, the merchant Juan Incera. In order to save his boss’s home from being destroyed, the mulatto Trinidad promised the previous day to deliver him. In spite of his wish to protect him, he was forced to deliver him to the junta in order to save his life.21 In his version of the February events, the Creoles’ top leader, García de Toledo, described February 4 as “one of the most disastrous for the fatherland,” due to the violent actions by lower-​class Blacks and mulattos. The Creole leader recounts that, “on February 5, when the city was deeply concerned because groups of people were imprisoning persons who they believed suspicious on their own, the supreme government appointed itself guardian of the general security.”22 García de Toledo’s role was to take advantage of the profound respect that the city’s subjects still had for him to personally contain the people and make them understand that in my general investigation tribunal they could accuse all persons deemed guilty, where they would be punished, in order for them to calm down and put an end to the imprisonments they were carrying out on their own.23 “On [February] 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10,” adds the mulatto Manuel Trinidad, “the imprisonments and movements continued, but at a lower rate, since the main conspirators had been detained and Mr. García de Toledo was following the

114  Black and mulatto artisans and the independence of the Republic insurrection’s cause.”24 However, in spite of the intervention by García de Toledo and the rest of the junta’s members to pacify the people, two of the most renowned royalist merchants, Juan de Francisco Martín and Juan Incera, were imprisoned in the barracks of the mulatto patriot battalion led by Pedro Romero, “isolated and guarded by two officers.”25 The junta’s initial reaction to the coup attempt by the Spaniards was to negotiate with its leaders. Proof of this is the fact that the Creoles did not even think of imprisoning Captain Miguel Gutiérrez, who had led the troop’s rebellion. On the contrary, the uprising was not yet under control when the junta had already decreed a general pardon, leaving behind all actions by the military officers involved in the coup.26 Merchants such as Juan Francisco de Martín and Tomás Torres, who had offered money for the troops to revolt, were left unbothered at their homes, which demonstrates that the imprisonment of the powerful Spanish military officers and merchants was a spontaneous act carried out by mulattos and Blacks. Not a single member of the junta, not even the most radical ones, took part in that decision. A careful reading indicates that, in principle, it was not an initiative by the battalions of organized mulatto artisans, who participated at a later time in the imprisonments carried out by spontaneous groups armed with machetes and sticks. The Creole leadership’s focus before the people’s uprising was to save the Spaniards’ lives and goods.27 It was therefore the people from the lower echelons who finished the Regency’s work of destroying the alliance between Spaniards and Creoles, now in a radical manner. After the main Spanish merchants were imprisoned, there was a massive exodus of royalists from Cartagena to Santa Marta. Very few important Spaniards remained in the city, with the exception of those who were in prison, and the political struggle radicalized in a direction that the moderate Creole elite in power did not desire. The conflict’s social character became increasingly relevant. Benito Azar, a spy sent to Cartagena by the recently appointed Viceroy Benito Pérez, wrote to the latter telling him that, while sailing to Kingston on his way back from Cartagena, I learned from the people that two thirds of Cartagena’s residents wished to destroy the junta and reestablish the old government, for with the former they were never safe in their homes due to the insolence of the vagrant Zambos, Blacks, and Mulattos, who the junta made no effort to hold back.28 The decisions made by García de Toledo regarding the imprisoned Spaniards delivered to the junta by the people reflected the hesitations of Cartagena’s Creole elite. Not a single large Spanish merchant was sentenced to prison. Francisco de Martín and Tomás Torres were declared innocent for lack of proof. All wealthy merchants and deadly enemies of the government were released and allowed to join the royalist forces in Santa Marta. As of that moment, García de Toledo’s

Black and mulatto artisans and the independence of the Republic  115 influence, and with it that of Cartagena’s moderate Creoles, on the people from the lower echelons tended to fade away.29 Nine months later, on November 11, 1811, the mulattos and Blacks from Getsemaní imposed by force the declaration of absolute independence of Cartagena on the Creole elites. In order to understand how this happened, we must examine, albeit briefly, the vertiginous development of the events that took place in the Colombian Caribbean throughout 1811. In one way or another, regional politics immensely complicated the already wavering Creole elite. III Cartagena was the only province in the Colombian Caribbean to expel the Spanish authorities in 1810 and to establish its de facto independence from the metropolitan government. Santa Marta and Riohacha expressed their loyalty to the king and the Spanish authorities from the start, and, supported by Cuba, Panama, and Maracaibo, they maintained that position to the end. Riohacha was sufficiently far from Cartagena and therefore did not threaten its security. In addition, although their military resources were quite scarce, Cartagena’s high-​ranking officials were perfectly aware of the uselessness of attempting to subdue the Guajiro Indians. Thus, after a few very feeble attempts, Cartagena gave up attempting to seize Riohacha. Santa Marta was different. Not only was it a flourishing port that had progressed significantly in the 1800s, but its condition as a military stronghold and its proximity to Cartagena made it very dangerous for the latter’s security. A significant part of the royalist Spaniards of New Granada had taken refuge in Santa Marta, especially the high-​ranking officers of the regular regiment of Cartagena, and in these circumstances, a military conflict between the two cities was inevitable. Cartagena’s annexation of the towns of Guaímaro, Sitio Nuevo, and Remolino, which belonged to the province of Santa Marta, triggered the war in July 1811.30 The conflict with Santa Marta lasted until 1815, but four years earlier, it led to a radicalization of the people’s actions against the Spaniards. The commander of Santa Marta’s forces, Colonel José Castillo, was the same person who, as commander of the regular army, had fled Cartagena to wage war against it, and a good part of the money invested in arming the men that would combat in the king’s name came from Cartagena merchants who, like Juan Francisco de Martín and Manuel Aparicio, continued determined to overthrow the Creoles’ government.31 On the other hand, that same year, Cartagena was forced to wage another war, less ruthless and shorter, but with consequences that were as profound or more so than those of the war with Santa Marta. In January 1811, without having yet consolidated the recently achieved political autonomy, its armies marched to subdue by force the prosperous city of Mompox, the world’s contraband capital, as Pombo described it, which had declared its independence from Cartagena in

116  Black and mulatto artisans and the independence of the Republic August 1810 and had sent its representatives to the congress appointed by Santa Fe.32 For most historians, the Mompox uprising is an excellent example of the separatist frenzy of the provinces, cities, and towns that afflicted New Granada during the Foolish Fatherland. This is true, but only on the surface, since Mompox did not suddenly decide to split from Cartagena, taking advantage of a power vacuum. Just as the roots of Cartagena’s separatism from Santa Fe went back to conflicts originating in the Colony, Mompox’s separatism from Cartagena also had very precise antecedents. Already in 1774, Mompox had managed to secede legally and became an independent province, albeit for a short time,33 and from that time to the political events of 1810, it experienced a vertiginous growth and prosperity. Its population grew from 3,500 inhabitants in 1778 to 16,000 in 1810. As a center for contraband, a commercial elite grew within its borders, took over immense properties, and accumulated great wealth. Evidence of this was the fact that at some point Mompox had more purchased nobility titles than Cartagena.34 Alongside this riverside nobility, and often within it, emerged a small group of enlightened Creoles who undertook a radical reform of the small town. In 1803, the most powerful man in this group, Pedro Martínez de Pinillos, established a fund to create a university that, for the first time in the viceroyalty, determined in its statutes that “pure blood” was not a prerequisite for admittance. Moreover, on the eve of the revolution, some of its most renowned intellectuals, such as Celedonio Piñeres, freed their slaves.35 More than a benefit, Cartagena was a burden for Mompox. In 1778, none of the provinces in the interior, including Santa Fe, gave more money than Mompox for Cartagena’s sustenance.36 Thirty years later, in 1809, Mompox continued contributing to Cartagena’s treasury with the significant amount of 50,000 pesos per year, much more than what by that time the Andean provinces provided individually.37 In addition, considering that Mompox was fifteen days away from Cartagena—​that is, twice the time required to travel to Santiago de Cuba or Jamaica—​it should not be surprising that it demanded its independence from the capital as soon as it was in a position to do so. Cartagena’s elite, who appeared so clear-​sighted when arguing in favor of separating from Santa Fe, resorted to arms as soon as Mompox’s separation appeared inevitable. Led by the lawyer Ayos, the two veteran battalions sent by the provincial capital quickly imposed their authority after defeating Mompox’s limited forces in the battlefield. Not content with this, the main leaders of the separatist movement, Vicente Celedonio Piñeres and Pantaleón Germán Ribón, were persecuted and forced to flee the city, and others, such as the Cárcamo brothers, relatives of the Piñeres, were imprisoned in Cartagena’s dreaded jails.38 Vicente Celedonio Piñeres was the oldest brother of Germán and Gabriel, who lived in Cartagena and were members of the recently created Supreme Governing Junta of the province. Their father, Juan Antonio Gutiérrez de Piñeres, was a nephew of the famous visiting regent Francisco Gutiérrez de Piñeres and had arrived in Mompox to hold an important position in the city’s

Black and mulatto artisans and the independence of the Republic  117 bureaucracy. Thanks to his uncle’s influence, he was appointed administrator of tobacco revenues, and with time, the family accumulated considerable wealth, apparently thanks to his engagement in commerce, which was the true source of all of Mompox’s wealth. Vicente and Germán studied law in Colegio del Rosario in Santa Fe, as was customary among distinguished Creoles. The oldest of the Piñeres brothers returned from Bogotá and settled in Mompox, where he attained solid prestige as a lawyer and council member, which allowed him to position himself at the head of the independence movement once it began to take shape. Germán, in contrast, settled in Cartagena, and by 1811 he had been living in the province’s capital for more than fifteen years. As a council member, he accompanied García de Toledo, Pombo, and other Cartagenan aristocrats in the activities that led to Governor Montes’s ousting. Apparently, Gabriel did not benefit from an education in the capital as his brothers did, and dedicated himself to commerce with very positive results.39 In November 1811, Gabriel Piñeres’s participation in the events leading to independence was decisive. His radicalism against the moderate sector of Cartagena’s aristocracy in many ways reflected the vitality of the powerful group of Mompox merchants and their eagerness to destroy Cartagena as a center of power, but the social content of his equalitarian discourse, with which he developed a solid alliance with Cartagena’s mulatto and Black leaders, was the product of the airs of modernity and progress that prevailed in the small town by the Magdalena River, a consequence of its opening to all commerce, all cultures, and all ideas. Gabriel was the group’s most visible member and gave Cartagena’s political struggle an openly anti-​Spanish and anti-​aristocratic character. IV It was not only the internal wars against Santa Marta and Mompox that hindered the policy of compromise fostered by Cartagena’s Creole elites. Two decisions by the Spanish Cortes in Cadiz also contributed to undermine moderate positions and had an enormous impact on strengthening the opinion that a radical break with Spain was necessary. The first one, on June 19, 1811, consisted of denying the Creoles in America the right to be represented in the Cortes of Cadiz under equal conditions as the Spanish provinces. Referring to this measure, 486 Cartagenan residents sent the junta a manifesto in which they stated: The signatory residents, in our name and that of our families, in the hope of guaranteeing the complete permanence of the political freedom we have conquered with a thousand risks and sacrifices […] nor do we abstain from expressing that we recognized the Cortes temporarily while, based on the principles of justice and equality proclaimed, they are legally constituted; yet having those same Cortes denied the said equality, and having the Americans been deceived by future hopes that will probably never come to fruition,

118  Black and mulatto artisans and the independence of the Republic as all the flattering offers made so far never did, it is time for that recognition to come to an end, for their bases are lacking, while simultaneously the peninsula’s government attempts by all means, even hostile ones, to ruin the work we have undertaken and to reduce us to our old captivity, with much heavier chains if it were to succeed.40 In other words, once Spain closed all avenues for any sort of negotiation regarding greater political equality for the colonies, the only option left for the Creoles’ discourse was independence. This elite’s main concern now was to achieve it peacefully and without causing major changes in the social behavior of the masses, neither of which it accomplished, as we shall see. The second decision of the Cortes of Cadiz did not affect the Creoles as much as it did most of Cartagena’s population, composed to a large extent of Blacks and mulattos. On August 18, 1811, the committee on constitutional affairs presented the draft of the new Constitution to the Cortes. Later known as the Constitution of 1812, its articles started to be approved in the sessions held in late August 1811. Regarding the important issue of equality for Americans, from August 25 to 31, the Cortes approved three articles without major obstacles. Article 1 defined the Spanish nation as “the union of all Spaniards from both hemispheres”; Article 5 defined Spaniards as “free men residing in Spain”; and Article 18 established the right of citizenship for “those Spaniards who are descendants on both sides from the Spanish dominions of both hemispheres.” The American delegates approved this last article with the condition that the status of free colored men, that is, Blacks, mulattos, and Zambos, be discussed separately in Article 22. This article confirmed that those racial groups would be denied citizenship, establishing that only exceptionally could the Cortes grant citizenship documents to colored men who stood out for their virtue and merits. The debate on this last article lasted from September 4 to 10 and entailed what was probably one of the strongest clashes between American and peninsular delegates. Most of the Creoles opposed this article, not because it ran counter to their philosophical convictions regarding equality, but because, by denying Blacks and mulattos the right to citizenship, they were being denied the right to vote. If such a considerable portion of the population of the Americas were thus eliminated from political life, America’s representation in the next Cortes would inevitably be a minority relative to peninsular representation. The Creoles were the victims of their own prejudices. In September 1810, it was the alternate delegate from Peru, Morales Duárez, who argued in favor of excluding the castes, “recognizing the serious disadvantages that such equality could entail, especially for Peru.” On September 10, 1811, the Cortes approved denying Spanish citizenship to Blacks and mulattos by a large majority of 108 votes against 36.41 The sessions of the Cortes of Cadiz were closely monitored in Cartagena. Until mid-​August, when it stopped circulating in that city, the newspaper Argos

Black and mulatto artisans and the independence of the Republic  119 Americano published a synthesis of what occurred in each session, a few weeks after they took place.42 There is no doubt that, upon learning of the results of the September 10 session of the Cortes, mulatto leaders such as Pedro Romero positioned themselves in favor of a radical separation from Spain. Once their right to equality was denied by the Cortes of Cadiz, Cartagena’s mulatto artisans started to relate that right to independence. V The Creole elite was perfectly aware of the relationship established between independence and social equality in the minds of Cartagenan mulattos and Blacks. In 1816, García de Toledo, the main leader of the opposition to a quick and drastic break with Spain, stated that he had greatly feared that the city’s mulattos and Blacks would murder him in the days following November 11, 1811. According to Toledo, Gabriel Piñeres and Ignacio Muñoz “persuaded them that I was an aristocrat, an enemy of independence and equality.”43 He added that, in 1810, while he was ordinary mayor, he was forced to file charges against and imprison some enslaved people involved in publishing pamphlets inciting to struggle “for the equality received with such blessings to swear independence.”44 Antonio José de Ayos, another important leader of the Creole elites, said in 1816, in the trial against him initiated by General Pablo Morillo, that as a result of my education and principles, I have never been on familiar terms with that sort of people, that it has been public knowledge that I have professed a constant aversion, persuaded that due to the circumstances of my birth or blue blood, as they said, stood against their coveted rights of equality, which was their only interest and the source of their fanaticism.45 Finally, in a text against García de Toledo, Piñeres said: It would be a miracle if, driven by nature and his blood’s love of that part [Spain] where his children live, and where there are privileges and blazons of nobility, [García de Toledo] was willing to resign himself with independence, which has destroyed those bases for pride, in order to open the doors to merits and virtue, whose liberal system sanctioned equality of rights, which is what displeases those purported noblemen.46 It therefore makes little sense to seek other motives for the breakup of the alliance between the popular sectors, led by Pedro Romero, and the Creole elite, commanded by García de Toledo. Nor does it seem credible that the Blacks and

120  Black and mulatto artisans and the independence of the Republic mulattos from Getsemaní risked their lives on November 11, 1811, and accepted Gabriel Piñeres’s leadership only because the latter offered them money and rum.47 According to Restrepo, Gabriel preached absolute equality everywhere, the dogma that destroys the social order. He was always seen surrounded by uneducated Blacks and Mulattos, and wanted other citizens to do likewise, to keep from being considered aristocrats.48 Cartagena’s declaration of absolute independence was not, as traditional historiography would have it, the product of the disputes between the elites loyal to Toledo and to Piñeres.49 The level of social tension produced on November 11 had components that are more complex and, without a doubt, the most important one was the clash between the Creole elite and the Black and mulatto artisans who sought equality. On November 11, Pedro Romero, at the head of the Lancers from Getsemaní and the rest of that neighborhood’s residents, attacked the arsenal. Armed with spears, rifles, and knives, his men broke into the room where the junta was meeting and demanded that it declare Cartagena’s absolute independence, and also that the officers of the mulatto militias be mulattos.50 García de Toledo, who tried to oppose the declaration, was beaten and threatened to death. Frightened, most of the Creole leaders present voted against their will in favor of the absolute separation from Spain. Leading the people, in addition to its mulatto leaders, was the Creole from Mompox Gabriel Piñeres and the lawyer from Corozal Ignacio Muñoz, who was married to a mulatto woman, daughter of Pedro Romero. However, it is worth highlighting that, except for Gabriel Piñeres, who was not a native of Cartagena, there was no other member of the Creole elite in the group of armed men who imposed independence.51 Not only outstanding players of the drama like García de Toledo and Ayos understood the November 11 events as the result of a popular uprising against the elites, but the press also reported it as such at the time. Antonio Nariño, with a perverse joy directed against Cartagena’s Creoles, said in his famous newspaper La Bagatela: In the last mail, the author of La Bagatela received countless letters and accounts of the events of November 11 in that city. It is impossible to include them all here or verbatim. From them we learn that the Lancers of Getsemaní patriot corps was the one who drove and maintained the revolution to reject the Cadiz Regency definitively, declaring absolute independence: that the people were tired of suffering a government more mysterious than that of the old governors: that it did with its governors the same thing they did with Montes, and with more authority and reason […] among the patriots that have stood out are the two Piñeres brothers, the renowned matancero [Pedro

Black and mulatto artisans and the independence of the Republic  121 Romero], Juan José Solano, Manuel Rublas, Ignacio Muñoz, and the leaders of the Mulattos, perpetual freedom lovers.52 García de Toledo called November 11 “the most disastrous for the fatherland […] a day of weeping and scandal not only for this city and its province, but for the entire kingdom.”53 However, those who believe that the reason for his opposition was that he did not want independence are entirely wrong. García de Toledo knew better than anyone did that, after the decisions made by the Cortes, the only alternative was separation from Spain. It was not the declaration of independence as such that led to such a harsh assessment by the Creole leader. That was not the source of his disagreement with the Piñeres brothers. The essential difference had to do with how to achieve independence, and with whom. In other words, it concerned whether it should be the result of a peaceful revolution, through which the Creole aristocracy naturally inherited power and the attendant privileges, or whether, in contrast, independence from Spanish domination should be the work of an “armed crowd” that did not fear directing its weapons even against its natural leaders.54 Toledo, Ayos, and the other Cartagenan Creoles believed that the next general convention of the province, to be held in 1812, should determine the separation from Spain. In other words, they thought that the enlightened Creoles, embodying authority, should deliver independence to the humble people and, of course, never the other way around. We should not forget that the idea of arming the mulatto and Black residents of Getsemaní and the actions to do so were at first García de Toledo’s work. What the leader of the moderate group did not forgive Gabriel Piñeres for was that, being a Creole and a member of the Mompox elites, he should contribute to arming the people against its leaders. “Would it not have been better for me to have died,” he wonders, “and not have taught the people to turn the artillery against the city?”55 García de Toledo was right in thinking that, as of that time and throughout the republic’s brief life, the Creole elite would be unable to impose its authority on Cartagena’s mulatto and Black population. As of November 11, 1811, and throughout the four years of this first independence, the political scenario was dominated to a large extent by the activity of armed mulattos and Blacks. According to Restrepo, since the people were called upon from the very beginning to participate in the movement to bring down the royal party, they became insolent; and people of color, who abounded in the city, acquired an influence that with time proved disastrous for public peace.56 The historian Jiménez Molinares reproduces much more precisely the Creole elite’s feelings upon losing all control over the people: the profound bitterness experienced by García de Toledo, Ayos, Granados, and Narváez at what they

122  Black and mulatto artisans and the independence of the Republic perceived as the disorder and anarchy of mulattos in power. Surprised by the fact that the republican convention held in 1812 to draft the constitution began by naming a president with dictatorial faculties, Jiménez Molinares says: This resulted from the state of incurable anarchy experienced in the city under the scourge of the masses organized in armed battalions, a situation present since November 11 the previous year and extending to December 6, 1815 […] the pressure of the armed masses against government bodies reduced their authority to a shadow; mutiny was the means by which all matters were resolved.57 This dramatic portrait, however, is far from the truth. There is no doubt that armed mulattos and Blacks made use of their power every time they considered it necessary, but not to the point of reducing authority to a shadow or of solving everything through mutinies. The situation did not reach the level it did in Haiti. Mulatto artisans were probably the least interested in taking it to that level. Creole leaders such as García de Toledo, Ayos, Del Real, and Granados continued holding important positions, and the state’s presidency was almost always in the hands of distinguished members of the Creole elite. It is likely that, in contrast, the mulatto leaders played a decisive role in avoiding a more violent insurrection by the masses, especially by enslaved people. Cases such as that of the mulatto patriots’ lieutenant Manuel Trinidad Noriega, who risked his life to save the Spanish merchants from the fury of the poorest people, must have been common. The top leader of the people of Cartagena until the constituent assembly in 1812 was Pedro Romero. Romero belonged to the class of respectable mulatto artisans who, since the late eighteenth century, had made efforts to shorten the distance that separated them from the Creoles. Born in Matanzas, Cuba, he settled in Cartagena at an early age. In 1778, at the age of twenty-​four, he lived in the neighborhood of Santa Catalina and was employed as a blacksmith. He was probably one of the many artisans that the engineer Antonio de Arévalo brought from Cuba to work in the fortifications. On the eve of the revolution, the Matancero, as people called him, must have enjoyed a respectable position, to the point of having great influence over his neighborhood’s residents. We know that in 1810 he begged the king to exempt his oldest son, Mauricio, from his mulatto condition in order for him to be allowed to study law. His daughter María Teodora was married to Ignacio Muñoz, a young provincial lawyer who settled in Cartagena and who became one of the leaders of the revolution. Many mulatto artisans owned enslaved people. We do not know whether Pedro Romero did, but his daughter and son-​in-​law had at least one enslaved woman in 1835. In 1810, Romero worked as a blacksmith in the city’s arsenal.58 Pedro Medrano, the other artisan who by the end of the struggle had more influence on the people than Romero, also worked in the arsenal.59

Black and mulatto artisans and the independence of the Republic  123 In 1812, Pedro Romero was elected representative in the convention that drafted the state’s constitution.60 This fact is significant because it demonstrated the power that mulattos had acquired, and because it broke with the centuries-​ old tradition of excluding men of color from important government positions. However, it was even more significant that in that convention a constitution was adopted that, for the first time on Colombian soil, forbade the trade of enslaved people and created a manumission fund to liberate them gradually.61 It is clear that, if the mulatto artisans opposed slavery, before the presence of powerful slaveholding landowners such as García de Toledo, Eusebio Canabal, and Santiago González, the former opted for a compromise that left slavery in place. On the other hand, the mulattos’ great achievement in the convention was to establish in the constitution what Spain had denied them: equality of rights for all free men, independently of their skin color or level of education.62 Everything seems to indicate that, at least during the years of the first republic, the mulattos made use of that right. In 1813, after leaving the city, the bishop of Cartagena, Frey Custodio Díaz, sent the king from Havana a detailed report on the situation in the insurgent port. In one section, he said: Regarding the system of government established in Cartagena de Indias […] there was a president of the state, a House of Representatives, a Senate, a High Court of Justice; in these bodies, Whites and Mulattos were together, bewildering a part of the people with this significant measure of equality.63 We have no notice of mulattos belonging to the Court of Justice, but we do know that Romero was not the only one to hold important positions. Cecilio Rojas and Remigio Márquez, together with Romero, signed the Constitution of 1812 as members of the constituent assembly.64 Pedro Medrano was a member of the constituent assembly that reformed the Constitution in 1814.65 Pedro’s son, Mauricio Romero, was appointed member of the Public Health Commission in 1812.66 It does not seem likely that, with these achievements, the mulattos had much interest in maintaining a state of permanent anarchy. For example, in 1815, Pedro Romero had broken with the Piñeres brothers and once again enjoyed the Creole elites’ trust. In March of the same year, while the Piñeres brothers were expelled from the city, Romero was part of the General Staff of War that strongly opposed surrendering weapons to Bolívar,67 and in October, he was a member of the province’s House of Representatives and one of the city’s most important military chiefs.68 VI Rather than the presumed anarchy caused by the mulattos and Blacks from Getsemaní, the confusion and disorder experienced in Cartagena in 1814 and 1815 had more to do with other developments that complicated the port’s

124  Black and mulatto artisans and the independence of the Republic political life, to the point of turning it into a no-​man’s-​land. In 1812, its leading class suffered two irreparable losses. Antonio de Narváez y la Torre and José Ignacio de Pombo died in January and April of that year, respectively.69 The former, in spite of being deeply opposed to the direction in which events were developing, was still general commander of the armies and perhaps the only person capable of maintaining a certain unity among the conflicting groups. Not only was he the most respected man by the Creole elites, but his immense prestige among the people was compounded by the fact that the Piñeres brothers, who led the popular party, were his nephews. In 1812, Pombo was a member of the constituent assembly, in which he no doubt contributed with his ideas against slavery to persuade the Creole landowners to accept the prohibition of the trade of enslaved people. In addition, he was in charge of the delicate mission of restructuring Cartagena’s army.70 With Pombo and Narváez dead, the lawyers García de Toledo and Ayos became almost exclusively in charge of directing Creole politics. Both were brilliant intellectuals and powerful landowners, but had no military experience. Aged more than forty years and afflicted with illnesses that forced them to take long rests, both demonstrated on several occasions a profound weakness of character and suffered from what was common among the leading elites of these slaveholding societies: a profound terror of insubordination by “people of color.” As a result, the people’s disrespect for these leaders’ authority found pathetic expressions. On November 11, 1811, as we saw, García de Toledo was beaten, insulted, and almost murdered by the masses who took the government palace, forcing him to declare independence out of fear. Ayos in turn had his dose of personal terror in an incident that he would later recount in full detail during his defense before the Spanish. According to his account, in 1812, in his position as a lawyer, he attempted to press charges against a certain José Cabarcas, who had sexually abused a young Spanish woman entrusted to Ayos by her parents before fleeing the city. As Ayos was going to the Court of Justice to begin the procedure, José Cabarcas, accompanied by some thirty Black and mulatto men, beat and chased him through the streets, and the Cartagenan leader only survived thanks to the intervention of other people who managed to appease the Cabarcas group.71 That year, it started to become evident that, without the money from other provinces, Cartagena had no means to survive the war with Santa Marta. Santa Fe and the other provinces turned a deaf ear to the continuous and desperate requests from Cartagenans, who rightly argued that the war with the neighboring city concerned all of New Granada.72 Most of the Spanish and Creole royalists had sought refuge in Santa Marta and were ready to fight against independence. Many merchants and landowners, recently arrived from the interior in 1812, had contributed with money, and many experienced military officers had joined the army.73 Left to its own devices and forced to finance its immense military expenses on its own, Cartagena turned to the inhabitants of its province, but

Black and mulatto artisans and the independence of the Republic  125 the abuse against people who had nothing to do with the decision to break from Spain predisposed them to rise up against Cartagena or to secretly favor Santa Marta’s forces. The forced loans, expropriations, and constant draft of peasants to increase the armed forces led to a profound discontent among the populations along the Magdalena River and the savannas in Tolú.74 Desperate with the turn of events in the war, Cartagena’s government opted for the radical solution of transforming the city into the headquarters for all pirates and adventurers at sea who were willing to go there. In a brochure written in Spanish, English, and French, which circulated throughout the Antilles, the pirates of the Caribbean were invited to act under Cartagena’s flags.75 The letters of marque and reprisal undoubtedly contributed to alleviating the financial situation. Sixty percent of all captures made by the corsairs went to the city’s treasury. Only in 1813 were close to sixty Spanish ships captured.76 Nonetheless, economic well-​being came at a very high price: the port was full of adventurers who, under the command of the famous French pirate Louis Aury, soon started to interfere in the city’s affairs. The corsairs and their crews were joined by Venezuelan military officers who fled to Cartagena whenever they were defeated in their country, led by Bolívar. Among Frenchmen and Venezuelans, there were at least 1,000 men or arms working for Cartagena’s government in 1814. As of 1812, the military officers who led the war against Santa Marta, and who were in charge of subduing the towns that had rebelled in the province, were almost all French or Venezuelan. The staff of Venezuela’s pro-​independence army served Cartagena from 1812 to 1815. Bolívar, Sucre, Soublette, Bermúdez, Mariño, Carabaño, Montilla, and many other officers and soldiers served in Cartagena’s army at some point in those three years.77 Little has been written about this outstanding episode of the war of independence of Spanish American countries. The fact is that, in 1814 and 1815, with Venezuela’s Creoles defeated once again, Cartagena was the only point in the Caribbean in open rebellion against Spanish domination. The fate of all of New Granada, including Santa Fe, whose military capacity was insignificant, depended on Cartagena. Hundreds of French, English, US American, and Caribbean pirates; Venezuelan officers and soldiers; and even regiments of free Haitian Black combatants went to Cartagena to join the struggle against Spain, driven by their libertarian ideals, by the desire for adventure, or by business interests. The French general Ducoudray, in charge of commanding the forts of Bocachica at the bay’s entrance, described the city’s atmosphere in September 1814, a few days before the constituent assembly met: At that moment, there were more than 800 foreigners in Cartagena, including the corsairs and their crews. Piñeres had a good standing among them […] Ducoudray then spoke with some of the owners of the pirate ships […] He called a meeting and with a short intervention convinced them to support the existing government and to oppose any group that attempted to overthrow it.

126  Black and mulatto artisans and the independence of the Republic The many crews of the corsair ships were secretly […] armed and organized into companies, and divided among the various neighborhoods of the city and in the most important positions of the defensive walls and batteries […] The captains of the corsair ships, the foreign officers and French, English and German merchants, and the commanders of a well-​armed battalion of French Mulattos deserve all the praise for having been able to maintain a severe discipline over that group of men of different countries and different colors.78 In this context, the conflict between the Creole elites and the popular party developed. In December 1814, the struggle for power between them reached its apex, and in the first months of 1815, the popular party was destroyed thanks to the support provided by the foreign corsairs and military officers to the Creole elites. VII The final episode of this struggle, which coincided with the destruction of the republic of Cartagena, has been told many times in the old Colombian historiography, minimizing the importance of the social conflict that thus reached its high point. The main events began in August 1814, when Manuel Rodríguez Torices stepped down as president of the state, a position he had held since June 1812, when he was elected by the constituent assembly for a three-​year period. The young journalist and lawyer Rodrígues Torices had governed with dictatorial powers. Aged only 25 years, he belonged to the group of enlightened Creoles of Cartagena and had inherited a considerable fortune from his father, the Spanish merchant Matías Torices, which allowed him to live without working. Together with Fernández de Madrid, he founded the newspaper El Argos Americano; since 1812, Torices had governed with the support of the popular party, and his presence in the government had been a guarantee for men like García de Toledo and Ayos against possible violent acts by the masses. This explains why, even though he was permanently advised by the Piñeres brothers, the local elite did not oppose his appointment. In August 1814, Torices stepped down in order to go to Tunja as a member of the triumvirate that would constitute the executive power of the Confederation of Provinces, together with Custodio García Rovira, from the province of Socorro, and the historian José M. Restrepo, who represented Antioquia.79 In September, the constituent assembly met to reform Cartagena’s constitution, granting more power to the confederation’s executive government, in a last and desperate attempt to save it. One of the measures taken was to eliminate the position of president dictator of the state and to replace it with that of governor of the province; thus, once the reform was approved, the governor was elected on December 17. The moderate Creoles controlled most of the votes of the delegates from the province’s towns, who were tired of the Piñeres brothers’

Black and mulatto artisans and the independence of the Republic  127 war policy and the rebellious actions of the city’s mulattos and Blacks; in addition, most of Cartagena’s votes were in the hands of friends of García de Toledo. As a result, fifteen delegates voted for Garcia de Toledo and ten for Germán Piñeres. After losing the election, the popular party forcefully annulled the decision and imposed a government led by two consuls, García de Toledo and Germán Piñeres.80 Fearing for his life, the former resigned and went into hiding in his house in Turbaco. Subsequently, Germán Piñeres, perhaps frightened by the consequences of his permanence in power, also resigned and proposed that the legislature elect a neutral governor. In January 1815, Pedro Gual—​a veteran Venezuelan revolutionary at the service of the State of Cartagena after the defeat of Bolívar’s second republic—​was elected governor. Most of Cartagena’s army was stationed in Sabanalarga, in campaign toward Santa Marta, at the moment of the uprising that dismantled García de Toledo’s government. Its commander was Manuel del Castillo y Rada, a Creole aristocrat allied to the former. Together with the foreign officers, Castillo suspended the campaign against Santa Marta and returned to Cartagena, determined to reestablish his friend’s government and to destroy the popular faction once and for all. The popular party in turn, fearing that Pedro Gual could hand over the city to Castillo’s army, conceived a plan to depose the Venezuelan governor and to replace him with Pedro Medrano, who, according to Jiménez Molinares’s prejudiced description, was A dark, ignorant man, but a bold leader of the masses who, raised to the status of governor, would assemble the irresponsible mob and would gain strength with it, even if society perished.81 Faced with the mere possibility of the government falling into the hands of a radical leader of the mulattos and Blacks, Gual reached an agreement with Castillo and the Venezuelan and French military officers led by Mariano Montilla and Ducoudray. He opened the city’s doors to Castillo’s army and disarmed the mulattos who controlled key positions, such as the castle of San Felipe.82 Once in control of the city, Manuel de Castillo immediately created a public security committee integrated by García de Toledo and Ayos, which deported the Piñeres brothers to the United States—​where they never arrived, remaining in Haiti instead—​and imprisoned more than eighty popular leaders and activists, who were later expelled from the city.83 In a letter to the king dated February 1815 informing him of the situation in Cartagena, the general captain of the royalist armies, Francisco de Montalvo, who was stationed in Santa Marta, said, evidently pleased at the course of events: Arriving under these circumstances at the election for governor of the state of the city of Cartagena, and in the face of a disagreement regarding Dr. José

128  Black and mulatto artisans and the independence of the Republic María García de Toledo’s appointment to that position due to the intrigues and influence of Gabriel Gutiérrez de Piñeres among the Zambos, and with the conflict reaching such dire levels, it became necessary for the expeditionary troops stationed on the right bank of the Magdalena River to march to Cartagena led by their general commander Manuel del Castillo in order to enforce Dr. García de Toledo’s election and put an end to the disturbances, which appeared to be heading in the direction of a civil war between the White and colored classes. All of this ended with the investment of the elected governor and the exile of the conspirators to North America; and to have expelled Germán Piñeres and his brother Gabriel from Cartagena together with the other members of their party was no little victory, because, believing themselves to have sufficient strength, they induced the latter to destroy White people, thus foreshadowing the most horrible war that could have threatened these countries.84 Once the mulatto and Black popular party was destroyed and its leaders and most outstanding members were imprisoned or exiled, the legislature felt free to appoint the Creole merchant Juan de Dios Amador as governor. However, peace would not return to Cartagena until after its destruction as an independent republic. The Creoles had not finished celebrating their victory when the armed forces of the Confederation of Provinces led by Bolívar, a close friend of the Piñeres brothers and an enemy of Cartagena’s strongman, Manuel del Castillo, laid siege to the city because of a disagreement regarding the delivery of some weapons. Bolívar’s siege lasted from March 26 to May 9, a period that the royalists of Santa Marta took advantage of to seize practically the entire Caribbean coast, including places as important as Mompox and Barranquilla.85 On July 6, after subjugating Venezuela, General Pablo Morillo, commander in chief of the Spanish reconquest forces, landed in Santa Marta with 6,000 soldiers. The expedition was headed to Cartagena. Bolívar had just fled to Haiti. Most of the towns in the province declared allegiance again to the king, Ferdinand VII, without the least resistance to Morillo.86 The small Indigenous town of Malambo, near Barrnaquilla, was one of the few that firmly resisted the Spanish.87 Cartagena was alone as never before against the formidable Spanish occupation army, and on August 20, Morillo began a siege of the stronghold. At that time, the Creole elite was still in control of the city. However, by mid-​ October, neither the Creoles nor the people had any control over the situation. The French and Venezuelan corsairs and military officers had removed Castillo y Rada from the army’s command and had appointed the Venezuelan Bermúdez instead. Most of the defense positions were commanded by them. In actual fact, it was the foreigners, and not the Creoles, who led the 106-​day heroic and suicidal resistance against the siege imposed by the Spanish troops.88 When Morillo entered Cartagena on December 6, more than 2,000 men had fled the previous night to the Caribbean islands in corsair ships. Many died in the attempt, and others returned as prisoners to Cartagena, only to die at the hands of

Black and mulatto artisans and the independence of the Republic  129 the Spanish. In Cartagena, more than 6,000 people had died of either hunger or the plague. General Morillo described to the minister of war the tragic situation in the stronghold on December 6, 1815: The city presented the most horrible spectacle to our eyes. The streets were full of corpses that infested the air and most of the residents were starving to death.89 However, not everything was heroic. Pascual Enrile, second in command after Morillo, wrote to the minister of the navy, “It is impossible to describe the horrid state of the city. The evil people in command kept the food; they gave cooked leather as food to the soldiers and nothing to the unfortunate residents.”90 For example, the Creole leader Antonio José Ayos declared in the trial before the Spanish that, even though I was forced to relinquish my last piece of jewelry, which I held quite dearly, I had enough food for many days and expected more from Jamaica, as I believe it probably did arrive onboard the ships that landed after the troops entered the city.91 Thus ended the first experiment of a republican government in Cartagena de Indias, after four years during which the mulatto and Black people, and not only the Creole elites, participated decisively in its political life, with their own representatives and their own projects of social equality. The city was defeated not only because of the severity of its own conflicts and social tensions, which put it on the verge of a war between Creoles and mulattos on several occasions, but also because it had to struggle against Spain’s power without any help from the inland provinces. In spite of his antipathy toward Cartagena, Restrepo acknowledges the following: There were many enemies of Cartagena in the provincial governments, who looked upon it as the tomb of the people and of the wealth of the interior […] for those reasons and because of the interests attributed to its government, generally composed of merchants, few provinces were willing to help it.92 Moreover, in 1835, Juan José Nieto, one of the most important nineteenth-​ century political leaders in Cartagena, said in a letter to General Santander, by that time president of the republic: No one can deny the clash of interests between the provinces of the coast and the center […] All of our patriarchs of independence concur in saying that, when the Spanish laid siege on the city and they requested help from the capital, it was denied to the commissioner who went there to present the request,

130  Black and mulatto artisans and the independence of the Republic Dr. Juan Marimón […] saying that they preferred to see Cartagena fall so they could march here to recover it, choosing rivalry over patriotism—​a rivalry that, according to contemporary testimonies, caused a thousand evils to the republic and unthinkable disasters to our land.93 This is the extent to which the conflict between the Caribbean and the Andes had an influence on the failure of the first independence. How could a nation composed of these two regions be conceived? The Creole leaders who survived the siege and fell into Morillo’s hands, such as García Toledo, Ayos, Del Castillo y Rada, and Ribón, were executed shortly after being imprisoned. In the trial against them for treason against the king, most of them adopted a most undignified stance, declaring their loyalty to the Crown and even personally denouncing many revolutionaries in order to save their own lives.94 Celedonio and Gabriel Piñeres joined Bolívar in the expedition of Les Cayes. During the massacre of Casa Fuerte in the city of Barcelona, Venezuela, they were beheaded, together with Celedonio’s wife and two of his sons.95 The mulatto leaders fared no better. Pedro Romero starved to death in Haiti, and Pedro Medrano was never seen again. Before executing the nine Creoles known today as the nation’s martyrs, Morillo had already executed thirty-​five people of humble origins. We know nothing about them except for their names.96 During Morillo’s siege, not only Cartagena’s entrepreneurial class disappeared, but also its best mulatto and Black men and women. More than 7,000 people died, many of them victims of the plague that devastated the city during the final days and that, according to Morillo, killed around thirty people per day.97 Cartagena was occupied by the Spanish until 1821. In fact, it was the last important city of New Granada to free itself from Spanish domination. Even though some delegates participated in its name in the congresses of Angostura and Villa del Rosario de Cúcuta, the city as such had no influence on the creation of Gran Colombia and no longer had any relevance whatsoever. As a result of the growth of the independence movement, the conflict surrounding the creation of the nation had shifted to the clash between the Venezuelan military troops and the swarm of Santa Fe lawyers and bureaucrats. Somehow, this was once again a conflict between the Caribbean and the Andes, but now the Caribbean was represented by Caracas, and not Cartagena. Gran Colombia was doomed to failure, as had been the attempts to create a nation with the provinces of New Granada, and more so now, since nothing united the Venezuelans and Santa Fe, not even a common administrative past. Gran Colombia was a mere instrument of war and nothing more. Once the war was over, Gran Colombia would disappear. In 1831, with Gran Colombia destroyed, Cartagena once again became part of an Andean republic, governed entirely from Santa Fe, as it never was in the old times of the viceroyalty. A new state had been created, but the sense of a nation

Black and mulatto artisans and the independence of the Republic  131 was far from present. In 1832, a group of Cartagenans continued to conspire with separatist projects.98 One century of civil wars cost the Colombian people the maintenance of a state whose origin was the product not of an “imagined community” but, plainly and simply, of an act of force. Notes 1 “Carta en que se refieren muchos hechos relacionados y consiguientes a la sublevación del Regimiento Fijo de Cartagena,” Cartagena, February 10, 1811, in Efemérides y Anales del Estado de Bolívar, comp. Manuel E. Corrales, vol. II (Bogotá: Casa Editorial de J. J. Pérez, 1889), p. 68. 2 “Respuesta del consulado de Cartagena al virrey sobre donativos,” November 10, 1809, AGN: Consulado, t. I, fs. 501–​502. 3 “Decreto del virrey Amar y Borbón del 4 de julio de 1809.” 4 In 1799 and 1800, Cartagena’s coast guard caught smuggled goods valued at 175,000 pesos, in Viceroy Mendinueta to M. C. Soler, Santa Fe, July 19, 1801, AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 648. 5 Pombo, “Informe del Real Consulado de Cartagena de Indias a Junta Suprema,” November 13, 1810. 6 Corrales, Efemérides y anales, vol. II, p. 3. 7 “Representación que el doctor don José M. García de Toledo, como diputado a las Cortes de España, dirige al virrey don Antonio Amar,” July 10, 1810, in Documentos para la historia de la provincia de Cartagena de Indias, hoy Estado Soberano de Bolívar en la unión colombiana, comp. Manuel Ezequiel Corrales (Bogotá: Imprenta de Medardo Rivas, 1883), vol. I, pp. 116–​118. 8 Ibid. 9 José P. Urueta and Eduardo G. de Piñeres, Cartagena y sus cercanías (Cartagena: Tipografía de Vapor Mogollón, 1912), pp. 533 and 550; “Apuntamientos para escribir una ojeada sobre la historia de la transformación política de la provincia de Cartagena,” in Corrales, Documentos, vol. I, pp. 126–​129. 10 Ibid., pp. 126–​128. 11 “Edicto por el cual el cabildo de Cartagena excita a los habitantes de la ciudad a procurar la unión, a que respeten y obedezcan a las autoridades, y ordena la formación de dos batallones,” and “Defensa hecha por el señor José M. García de Toledo,” in Corrales, Documentos, vol. I, pp. 94 and 390. 12 Gabriel Jiménez Molinares, Los mártires de Cartagena de 1816 ante el consejo de guerra y ante la historia (Cartagena, 1948–​1950), vol. I, pp. 146–​147. 13 “Detención en los castillos de Bocachica del brigadier José Dávila,” November 29, 1810, in Corrales, Efemérides y Anales, vol. 2, p. 34; Corrales, Documentos, vol. I, “Defensa hecha por el señor José M. García de Toledo.” pp. 380–​390. 14 Urueta and Piñeres, Cartagena y sus cercanías, p. 287. 15 “Alocución de la Junta Suprema de Cartagena de Indias, con motivo del nombramiento hecho por la Regencia en el brigadier José Dávila, para gobernador de la plaza y su provincia,” November 9, 1810, in Corrales, Efemérides y Anales, vol. II, pp. 32–​33. 16 “Acuerdo que reorganiza el gobierno provincial,” in Corrales, Efemérides y Anales, vol. II, pp. 41–​48.

132  Black and mulatto artisans and the independence of the Republic 17 “Reconocimiento de las Cortes Generales. Acta de la Suprema Junta de la ciudad y provincia de Cartagena de Indias,” December 31, 1810, in Corrales, Efemérides y Anales, vol. II, pp. 58–​59. 18 Jiménez Molinares, Los mártires, pp. 150–​153. 19 “Insurrección del Regimiento Fijo de Cartagena,” in El Argos Americano, 18, Cartagena, January 28, 2811; “Carta en que se refieren muchos hechos,” in Corrales, Efemérides y Anales, vol. II, pp. 65–​66. 20 Jiménez Molinares, Los mártires, pp. 251–​252. 21 “Carta en que se refieren muchos hechos relacionados y consiguientes a la sublevación del Regimiento Fijo de Cartagena,” in Corrales, Efemérides y Anales, vol. II, p. 67. 22 “Defensa hecha por el señor José M. García de Toledo,” in Corrales, Documentos, vol. I, p. 392. 23 Ibid. 24 “Carta en que se refieren muchos hechos relacionados y consiguientes a la sublevación del Regimiento Fijo de Cartagena,” p. 68. 25 Ibid. 26 “Informe del capitán Miguel Gutiérrez del Regimiento Fijo,” Havana, March 3, 1811, in AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 747. See also “Oficio del teniente general don Antonio de Narváez al secretario de Estado del Despacho Universal de Indias,” Cartagena, January 27, 1811, in José Manuel Restrepo, Documentos importantes de Nueva Granada, Venezuela y Colombia (Bogotá: Imprenta Nacional, 1969), vol. I, p. 21. 27 Ibid. See also “Comprobantes citados en la anterior defensa,” in Corrales, Documentos, vol. I, pp. 396–​401. 28 “Informe de don Benito Azar al virrey don Benito Pérez,” Mérida de Yucatán, April 26, 1811, in AGI: Santa Fe, legajo 630. 29 “Defensa hecha por el señor José M. García de Toledo,” in Corrales, Documentos, vol. I, pp. 396–​401. 30 Jiménez Molinares, Los mártires, vol. I, pp. 214–​225. 31 “Tentativa extravagante,” in El Argos Americano, 31, April 29, 1811. 32 On the war between Cartagena and Mompox, see the following documents: “El mes de agosto de 1810 en la villa de Mompox,” August 1810; “Exposición de la Junta de Cartagena de Indias sobre los sucesos de Mompox, encaminados a formar una provincia independiente,” Cartagena, December 4, 1810; “El representante de Mompox contesta al manifiesto de la Junta Suprema de Cartagena que antecede,” Santa Fe, January 28, 1811; “Exposición de los representantes de la provincia de Mompox al congreso general de este reino, para que se les admita en su seno, como se han admitido otros diputados de otras varias provincias,” Santa Fe, January 1, 1811, in Corrales, Documentos, vol. I, pp. 187–​234. See also Rafael Soto, Decenios de Mompox en la independencia (Barranquilla: Tipografía Mora y Escofet, 1967, 1st ed.: 1841) and Pedro Salzedo del Villar, Apuntaciones historiales de Mompox (Cartagena: Espitia Impresores, 1987), pp. 97–​118. 33 Ibid., pp. 225–​231. 34 Orlando Fals Borda, Mompox y Loba. Historia doble de la Costa (Bogotá: Carlos Valencia Editores, 1980), vol. I, pp. 75–​92. 35 Ibid., pp. 123–​131; Salzedo del Villar, Apuntaciones, pp. 77–​90. 36 Miklos Pogonyi, “The Search for Trade and Profits in Bourbon Colombia, 1765–​ 1777” (Ph.D. diss., University of New Mexico, 1978), pp. 139–​148.

Black and mulatto artisans and the independence of the Republic  133 37 “Cuadro revolucionario y estado actual de la provincia de Cartagena,” in Gaceta del gobierno de Cartagena de Indias, September 14, 1816, Cartagena: Biblioteca Bartolomé Calvo, rollo 93. 38 Jiménez Molinares, Los mártires, pp. 177–​184. 39 Salzedo del Villar, Apuntaciones, pp. 117–​122. Eduardo Lemaitre, Historia General de Cartagena de Indias (Bogotá: Banco de la República, 1983), vol. III, pp. 124–​137. 40 “Representación de muchos vecinos de Cartagena para que se expida la Constitución Provincial,” in Corrales, Efemérides y Anales, vol. II, p. 72. 41 James King, “The Colored Castes and American Representation in the Cortes of Cadiz,” Hispanic American Historical Review 33, no. 1 (1953): 33–​64; Timothy E. Anna, “Spain and the Breakdown of the Imperial Ethos: The Problem of Equality,” Hispanic American Historical Review 62, no. 1 (1982): 242–​272. 42 El Argos Americano, Cartagena, 1811. Several issues. 43 Roberto Arrázola, Los mártires responden (Cartagena: Ediciones Hernández, 1973), p. 17. 44 Ibid., p. 32. 45 Ibid., p. 161. 46 Corrales, Documentos, vol. I, p. 231. 47 See the newspaper Década Miscelánea de Cartagena, 15, Cartagena, February 28, 1815, in Corrales, Efemérides y Anales, vol. II, pp. 178–​179; see also Jiménez Molinares, Los mártires, p. 96. 48 Restrepo, Historia de la revolución, vol. I, p. 183. 49 Jiménez Molinares, Los mártires, pp. 94–​ 98. See also Peter Paul Guzzo, “The Independence Movement and the Failure of the First Republic of Cartagena de Indias, 1810–​1815” (PhD diss., The Catholic University of America, 1972), esp. pp. 117–​121, 186, and 253–​266; and Adelaida Sourdís, Cartagena de Indias durante la primera república, 1810–​1815 (Bogotá, 1988). 50 Urueta and Piñeres, Cartagena y sus cercanías, p. 567. This second request has been ignored by traditional historiography, even though it very clearly reveals the social content of the independence movement since its beginnings. 51 “Exposición de los acontecimientos memorables relacionados con mi vida política, que tuvieron lugar en este país desde 1810 en adelante,” in Corrales, Documentos, vol. I, pp. 410–​413. 52 Antonio Nariño, La Bagatela (Bogotá: Editorial Cahur, 1947), p. 157. 53 Corrales, Documentos, vol. I, p. 390. 54 “A los pueblos de las Sabanas, del Cauca y del Sinú de los diputados de las municipalidades,” Turbaco, January 12, 1815, and “Extracto de las sesiones del Colegio Electoral y Revisor de la Constitución del Estado de Cartagena de Indias,” in Corrales, Efemérides y Anales, vol. II, pp. 184 and 163n2. 55 Ibid., p. 394. 56 Restrepo, Historia de la revolución, vol. I, p. 167. 57 Jiménez Molinares, Los mártires, vol. I, p. 287. 58 On Pedro Romero and his family, see “Censo de artesanos del barrio de Santa Catalina, 1780,” Roberto Arrázola, Secretos de la historia de Cartagena (Cartagena: Ediciones Hernández, 1967), pp. 67–​69; Imparcial, Recuerdos históricos relacionados con la vida política del doctor Ignacio Muñoz (Cartagena: Tipografía de Donaldo R. Grau, 1880), p. 6; Manuel Marcelino Núñez, Exposición de los acontecimientos

134  Black and mulatto artisans and the independence of the Republic memorables relacionados con su vida política, que tuvieron lugar en este país desde 1810 en adelante (Cartagena, 1864); Donaldo Bossa Herazo, La vida novelesca e infortunada del doctor Ignacio Muñoz, paladín de la libertad (Cartagena: Impresora Marina, 1961), pp. 6–​10; Antonio del real Torres, Biografía de Cartagena, 1533–​1945 (Cartagena: Imprenta Departamental, 1946), p. 116; Urueta and Piñeres, Cartagena y sus cercanías, p. 354; Molinares, Los mártires, pp. 244–​248 and 285–​288; Corrales, Documentos, vol. I, pp. 65–​66, 94–​95, 411, 413–​417, 423, and 449. 59 Urueta and Piñeres, Cartagena y sus cercanías, p. 534. 60 Corrales, Documentos, vol. I, p. 546. 61 “Constitución del Estado de Cartagena de Indias,” Cartagena, June 15, 1812, in Manuel Antonio Pombo and José Joaquín Guerra, Constituciones de Colombia (Bogotá: Talleres del Banco Popular, 1986), p. 161. 62 Ibid., p. 151. For a traditional interpretation of Cartagena’s 1812 Constitution, see Guzzo, “The Independence Movement,” pp. 183–​197. 63 Roberto Arrázola, Documentos para la historia de Cartagena, 1813–​ 1820 (Cartagena: Tipografía Hernández, 1963), p. 41. 64 Pombo and Guerra, Constituciones de Colombia, vol. II, p. 168. 65 “Extracto de las sesiones del Colegio Electoral,” Corrales, Efemérides y Anales, vol. II, pp. 156–​169. 66 Corrales, Documentos, vol. I, p. 449. 67 Urueta, Los mártires, p. 105. 68 Jiménez Molinares, Los mártires, vol. II, pp. 120, 251. 69 Jiménez Molinares, Los mártires, vol. I, p. 285; “Cartas del archivo del doctor Miguel de Pombo,” in Colección de documentos para la historia de Colombia. Época de la Independencia, ed. Sergio Elías Ortiz (Bogotá: Editorial ABC, 1966), p. 213. 70 Corrales, Documentos, vol. I, p. 376. 71 Jiménez Molinares, Los mártires, vol. I, p. 287. 72 Restrepo, Documentos importantes, vol. I, pp. 172 and 181. 73 Ibid., p. 171. 74 “Discurso del excelentísimo señor presidente gobernador del Estado independiente de Cartagena, en la apertura de las sesiones de la Cámara de Representantes del mismo Estado,” Cartagena, January 8, 1813, in Corrales, Documentos, vol. I, pp. 557–​560; “Informe que el teniente de leales voluntarios de Santa Marta don Miguel de Bustillo y Colina dirige a las Cortes españolas, sobre las verdaderas causas de la pérdida de la plaza de Santa Marta y parte de su provincia,” Kingston, Jamaica, March 12, 1813, in Ibid., pp. 618–​622. 75 Restrepo, Documentos Importantes, vol. I, p. 205; Sourdís, Cartagena de Indias, p. 48. 76 “Año del 1813: relación de los buques extranjeros y del estado en que han entrado en este puerto en el presente año,” in El Mensajero de Cartagena de Indias. Periódico del gobierno, Cartagena, February 11, 1814. 77 See Jiménez Molinares, Los mártires, vols. I and II; Sergio Elías Ortiz, Franceses en la Independencia de la Gran Colombia (Bogotá: Editorial ABC, 1971); H. L. V. Ducoudray Holstein, Memoirs of Simón Bolívar (Boston: S. G. Goodrich, 1829), pp. 64–​122; Guzzo, “The Independence Movement,” p. 245. 78 Ducoudray Holstein, Memoirs of Simón Bolívar, pp. 77–​78. 79 Jiménez Molinares, Los mártires, vol. I, p. 297. Urueta, Los mártires, pp. 124–​151. 80 Corrales, Efemérides y Anales, vol. II, pp. 156–​171.

Black and mulatto artisans and the independence of the Republic  135 8 1 Jiménez Molinares, Los mártires, vol. I, p. 88. 82 “Mensaje del general Manuel del Castillo y Rada dirigido al poder ejecutivo federal con el cual le da cuenta documentada de los sucesos que han tenido lugar en Cartagena desde el 17 de diciembre de 1814,” in Corrales, Efemérides y Anales, vol. II, pp. 181–​ 196. Jiménez Molinares, Los mártires, vol. II, p. 88. 83 Arrázola, Los mártires, pp. 168–​169. 84 Jiménez Molinares, Los mártires, vol. II, pp. 88–​89. 85 Ibid., pp. 121–​125. 86 Corrales, Documentos, vol. II, pp. 103–​117. 87 Ibid., pp. 123–​127. 88 Ducoudray Holstein, Memoirs of Simón Bolívar, pp. 101–​122. 89 In Jiménez Molinares, Los mártires, vol. II, p. 316. 90 Ibid. 91 Arrázola, Los mártires, p. 160. 92 Restrepo Documentos Importantes, vol. I, p. 181. 93 Juan José Nieto, Selección de textos políticos-​geográficos e históricos (Barranquilla: Ediciones Gobernación del Atlántico, 1993), pp. 21–​22. 94 See Arrázola, Los mártires. 95 Bossa Herazo, La vida novelesca, p. 14. 96 Antonio Rodríguez Villa, El Teniente General don Pablo Morillo, Primer Conde de Cartagena, Marqués de la Puerta (Madrid: Tipografía de Fortanet, 1908), vol. III, p. 132. 97 Ibid., p. 5. 98 Restrepo speaks of the conspiracies of a club in Cartagena called Veteranos de la libertad (Veterans of Freedom). It is interesting to know that several of its prominent members were mulattos and Mestizos; one such example is Juan José Nieto, who was its general secretary, and Pedro Laza, its vice president. See José Manuel Restrepo, Historia de la Nueva Granada (Bogotá: Editorial Minerva, S. A., n.d.), p. 48.

Conclusions

In the early eighteenth century, few Spanish American colonies were as characterized by the structural weakness of their government as New Granada. The Bourbons’ rise to power signaled the beginning of great efforts to implement a policy of centralization and efficiency of the colonial government. However, imposing a central authority on the territory of New Granada, and especially on its seaside provinces, was an impossible task in the midst of a growing imperial crisis and the no less problematic conditions of this South American colony. In 1717, a definitive solution was attempted for the first time by creating the Viceroyalty of New Granada. At the time, Cartagena and Santa Fe competed for the condition of capital of the viceroyalty and seat of the viceroy and the Royal Audiencia. Cartagena’s elite deployed its geographic position as its main argument in favor of its viceregal aspirations. It highlighted the economic and military importance of the Caribbean for Spain and the need to strengthen imperial authority in the ungovernable Caribbean societies. Santa Fe, in contrast, deployed the Caribbean’s negative image: it spoke of its pestilent climate, its lack of enlightenment, its meager population, its marginal geographic position, since the kingdom was above all an Andean kingdom, and its lack of a bureaucratic tradition. Frightened with the Caribbean disorder, the Counselors of the Indies in Madrid decided that the viceroyalty’s capital would be safer in the impenetrable heights of the Andes, in the city of Santa Fe de Bogotá, from where the viceroy would rule as the sole authority of a territory so complicated that simply traversing it was a nearly impossible feat—​due to the enormous difficulties faced on its roads, the extreme poverty of its resources, and the long tradition of indifference of some regions toward the others. However, in fewer than five years, the Crown was convinced of the enormous failure of a viceroy that was not obeyed by anyone beyond the eastern Andes and of a viceroyalty that did not produce enough even to pay its own authorities. As a result, it decided to return things to their former state. The second attempt to find a definitive solution took place in 1739, when the Viceroyalty of New Granada was finally created. By then, the need for a central

DOI: 10.4324/9781003381198-8

Conclusions  137 authority was an urgent matter. In the midst of the war with England, Spain was aware of the imminence of an English attack against the Caribbean ports and was profoundly concerned by the growing insecurity of New Granada’s coast, which was controlled by smugglers. Above all, however, Madrid was concerned about the fate of the stronghold of Cartagena, the most powerful in Spanish America’s defensive system after Havana. The viceroy Sebastián Eslava arrived in Cartagena on April 21, 1740. The clearest evidence of his true mission is the fact that, during the ten years of his government, he never set foot in Santa Fe. During his entire administration, he governed from Cartagena, first absorbed by the needs of the war against Admiral Vernon, and later by the struggle against contraband. Controlling Cartagena from Santa Fe would have simply been impossible. Eslava’s successors did likewise. For example, the viceroy/​ archbishop Caballero y Góngora governed the viceroyalty for six years, more than four of which he remained in Cartagena. With the arrival of Viceroy Gil Lemos, however, the centralist ambitions of Charles III’s enlightened officials led to a change in this policy of tolerance by the viceroys of Cartagena’s autonomic tendencies. Gil Lemos attempted to impose viceregal authority from Santa Fe through threats and arrogant gestures. Naturally, he failed, as Mendinueta and Amar y Borbón would do later. As of Gil Lemos’s government, contraband through the Caribbean grew more than ever and became a dominant force in the viceroyalty’s economic life. During the government of the last three viceroys, it was not only Spanish officials who made efforts to impose Santa Fe’s authority over the Colombian Caribbean. The Creole elite of the Andean interior participated decisively. The attempts to subject the stronghold to an economic policy that reflected the interests of Santa Fe landowners and merchants were accompanied by an increasingly authoritarian and inflexible attitude on the part of the viceregal bureaucracy toward Cartagena—​a bureaucracy composed to a large extent of Creoles belonging to the capital’s powerful families. The efforts to control Cartagena ended in failure once again. In the final years of the Colony, an elite of merchants and landowners with clear reformist tendencies developed in that port. This elite, whose highest expression was José Ignacio de Pombo, conceived the progress of the coastal provinces as inextricably linked to the Caribbean’s economic expansion in general. In open opposition to the interests of the Andean interior, it defied the viceroy’s power and his Creole bureaucracy, who opposed the Caribbean project, and in 1809 confronted them openly and began managing its economic policies autonomously. The political events of 1810 led to the expulsion of the viceroy, the Royal Audiencia, and the governor of Cartagena. The elites of both cities were left in control of the political power of the viceroyalty’s two most important centers. Becoming republican enthusiasts overnight, Santa Fe’s Creoles attempted once again what they had been unable to accomplish under the viceroys of the Bourbon

138  Conclusions dynasty: to subject the Colombian Caribbean to the control of the Andean central authority. The conflict was inevitable. Not even the survival instinct of a city that depended on the money from the Andean provinces made Cartagena’s elites accept Santa Fe’s authority. In fact, it had never done so. During the period of the first independence (1810–​1815), the conflict between the elites of Cartagena and Santa Fe went through its republican phase. Building a nation-​state centered on the Andes was impossible as long as Cartagena had enough power to resist. In 1815, Pablo Morillo’s reconquering army completely destroyed Cartagena’s military, economic, and political power, while Santa Fe and the rest of the Andean provinces remained passive, and the formerly powerful Caribbean stronghold fell under Spain’s control once again until 1821. Once Cartagena was destroyed, Gran Colombia became the work of Bolívar’s Venezuelans and Santander’s Santafereños. Cartagena had little or nothing to do with this new failure. The nation-​state called Gran Colombia proved to be a dream (or a nightmare) that died with its dreamer, and from its destruction in 1831 emerged three new republics: Venezuela, Ecuador, and New Granada. Cartagena, in the direst misery and desolation, was subjected to Santa Fe’s authority. Independence was not only the political space where the old regional conflict between the viceroyalty’s two most important centers of power was resolved. During this period, there was also a very important episode for the social history of Spanish America. In the entire national territory, Indians, Mestizos, Blacks, mulattos, and Zambos attempted to transform the relations of subjection and discrimination in place during three centuries. Their accomplishments were diverse, and in many cases transitory and limited. The powerful Andean and Caribbean aristocracies were not willing to give up their old social and political privileges, and only relinquished them whenever the presence of a terrifying force gave them no choice. We still know little about the participation of the subaltern classes of New Granada in the independence movement, but the attempts to depict their intervention have almost always ended up portraying them as a mass led to formal freedom and equality by the Creole leaders. Examining the events in Cartagena reveals a more complex and sometimes confusing reality, as things tend to be in real life. What does seem clear, however, is that Cartagena’s mulatto and Black populations made their own decisions, conceived their own alliances, and defended their own claims based on their own calculations and feelings. Pedro Romero’s parable illustrates this assertion well. Moreover, if their achievements seem minor to us now, they were extremely important, despite their limitations. In Cartagena’s Constitution of 1812, the right of all men to participate without any racial limitation in the political life of the recently constituted state was recognized for the first time. This was not merely a simple formality. Cristóbal Polo was not allowed to work as a lawyer in Cartagena in 1765 because he was the son of mulatto parents, even though he could pass as White. By 1815, however, mulattos of humble

Conclusions  139 origins had been elected to the parliament, to the constituent assemblies, and even to the General Staff of War. That year, the only thing that kept a mulatto president from being appointed was the armed intervention by the Creoles and the foreigners living in the city. On the other hand, there is a question that this research study has not even attempted to answer: how was the struggle for independence experienced in the rural towns of the Colombian Caribbean? Some hypotheses could serve as a point of departure for future studies on this topic. First, the enormous difficulties faced by the elites to organize armies and the constant mention in documents of the desertions of soldiers on both sides lead us to suppose that there was not much enthusiasm in those towns over a war on which they were never consulted. The little we know about this phenomenon of desertion can lead us to surprising conclusions. For example, two of the most important military events of the war between Cartagena and Santa Marta were the subjection of the latter city by the Creoles and its recovery by the Spanish in 1812. Both facts were celebrated by the winners as great military feats. However, a careful reading of the contemporary accounts demonstrates that what happened was less heroic than it appeared at first glance. In both cases, the “armies” in control of Santa Marta deserted instead of confronting the enemy. Second, both the royalists of Santa Marta and the patriots of Cartagena subjected the towns of both provinces to all sorts of abuse, from the imposition of forced loans and the circulation of currencies with no value to burning down dissenting towns. This led to an attitude of weariness and despair among most of the people, who only wished to put an end to the war, and explains why, upon Pablo Morillo’s arrival, many important towns peacefully submitted to the Spanish regime after having shown enthusiasm and having supported the cause of independence. Third, the notion that Indigenous people were royalists and enemies of the Creoles seems far from convincing. There were all sorts of positions, and we know little about the concrete origin of their political attitudes. For example, one of the few peoples who confronted Morillo’s armies with heroic resistance were the Indians from Malambo, a small town on the margin of the Magdalena River. Almost all of them died defending independence. Moreover, not even the viceroy Montalvo was entirely convinced of the monarchism of the courageous Indians and Zambos who took Santa Marta from the Frenchman Labatut. On the contrary, in a revealing letter, he expresses his fears and distrust of the same people who were enthusiastically praised by the Spanish government: When I arrived here [Santa Marta], I learned that they had committed the imprudence of arming with the rifles available the Indians of neighboring towns, who, while useless at the moment of action, are quite audacious when opposing orders from above, when robbing the haciendas of wealthy citizens with impunity, and when slandering them calling them Jacobins, which they take to mean dissident—​that is the effect of that measure. The Zambos in

140  Conclusions turn, who comprise an even worse caste, also join the Indians and hinder the government’s resolutions, so that, while their decision to resist the insurgents is admirable, the preponderance they have been allowed to have is equally fearful.1 If a general conclusion were to be reached regarding this period of the Independence, perhaps the most appealing would be that it makes little sense to continue believing that it was conceived with the purpose of turning the provinces of New Granada into an independent nation. There was more than one “imagined nation.” The Caribbean elites’ project for the nation had little in common with that of the Andean elites of Santa Fe. On the other hand, the nation that Cartagena’s mulattos wanted to build could not have been the same as that conceived by Ayos or García de Toledo. Furthermore, in the case of Indigenous people, how can we interpret their nationalism as they took over the lands of the “Jacobins” to defend the Spanish nation? How was it possible, then, for a single nation-​state to have emerged in 1831, in the midst of such diverse conceptions? It was certainly not the result of an “imagined community” but rather of the simple use of force. The armies were now in hands of the Andean elites, and these finally imposed their government. Inventing the Colombian nation cost many wars. This is because in addition to its profoundly destructive function, war was the best means for the masses of peasants from cold lands, turned into soldiers, to discover and begin to feel the Caribbean world as their own; and vice versa, for the coastal populations to begin to conceive that other side of the country as their own. The project of building the nation still remains an unfinished reality, immersed in all sorts of cultural conflicts. Whatever advances have been made were not only the result of the “community imagined by the elites,” but of the conflicting and often chaotic encounter of different projects in which the subalterns have played a decisive, albeit overlooked, role. Note 1 Arrázola, Documentos para la historia de Cartagena, 1813–​1820 (Cartagena: Tipografía Hernández, 1963), pp. 39–​40.

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Index

Note: Endnotes are indicated by the page number followed by “n” and the note number e.g., 82n11 refers to note 11 on page 82. Acevedo y Gómez, José 82n11, 97 Acosta, Tomás de 111 Alberdi 61 Algiers 29 Alvarez, Manuel Bernardo 90–​1, 97–​8, 100–​1, 103 Amador, Esteban de 86 Amador, Juan de Dios 58, 65n70, 70, 86–​7, 104n12 Amador, María Josefa 59 Amar y Borbón 90, 96, 102, 103n1, 103n3, 104n7, 131n3, 137 Americas 33, 43, 76, 88, 96, 118 Andalucía 86 Anderson, Benedict ix, xi, 5, 10n21 Andes 14–​15, 19–​20, 28–​9, 33, 35, 69–​70, 77, 91, 100, 102, 130, 136, 138 Angostura 130 Anguiano, Manuel 113 Ante y Valencia, Tomasa de 59 Antilles 125 Antioquia 14, 16, 18, 20, 24, 25n17, 98, 101, 127 Aparicio, Manuel 115 Aranjuez 86, 92 Arauca 17 Arévalo, Antonio de 46, 62n22, 122 Argos Americano 102, 118, 126, 132n19, 31, 132n42 Arrubla, Gerardo 1, 9n2, 104n10, 24, 106n48 Astronomical Observatory 72

Atlantic 15, 19 Atrato River 17 Aury, Louis 125 Aviles 107 Ayos, José A. de 65n70, 87–​8, 98, 103n1, 103n6, 104n12, 116, 119–​22, 124, 126–​7, 129–​30, 140 Azar, Benito 114, 132n28 Azuola, Luis E. 98 Badillo, Jerónimo 37 Baltimore 86 Barbier, Jacques 63n34, 79, 82n4, 83n48 Barranca 19 Barranquilla 19, 32, 41n12, 41n16, 41n21, 77, 128 Benito Revollo, José M. 65n70, 87–​8, 103n1, 104n12 Bermúdez, General 125, 128 Bernal Desjean, Jean 44 Bocachica 105n38, 125, 131n13 Bocagrande 46, 62n22 Bocas de Ceniza 19 Bolívar, Simón 29, 103, 104n27, 105n38, 123, 125, 127–​8, 130, 131n1, 131n7, 134n77, 134n78, 135n88, 138 Bonaparte, Napoleon 93 Botanical Expedition 72 Bourbon, House of 24, 59, 136 Boves 103 Boyacá 17 Buenaventura 16 Buenos Aires 44, 57, 77

154 Index Bushnell, David 3, 9n11 Bustamante, Francisco 107, 113 Caballero y Góngora 30, 75–​6, 137 Caballero y Góngora, Antonio 41n14, 17, 75, 83n36 Cabarcas, José 124 Caja de Consolidación de Vales Reales 79 Caldas, Francisco José de 9, 11n27, 28, 39n2, 39n3, 61, 65n79, 72–​3 Caledonia 30 Cali 16, 24, 25n15 Campillo 60 Campomanes 60 Canabal, Manuel 49, 70, 123 Canal del Dique 18–​19, 26n23, 72–​3 Canary Islands 31 Carabaño 125 Caracas 33, 40n12, 68, 73, 76–​8, 82–​3, 86, 93–​4, 96, 98, 103, 130 Carare River 72–​3 Cárcamo brothers 116 Cartago 20 Casa Valencia, Count of 59–​60 Casal y Montenegro, Benito 90 Casanare 17, 101 Castile 51–​2, 88, 90 Castillo, José 87, 90, 104n12, 111, 115 Castillo y Rada, Manuel del 127, 128, 130, 135n82 Catalonia 88 Cauca River 14, 29 Cauca Valley 16 Central America 43 Central Cordillera 16 Central Governing Junta 86 Charles III 46, 67, 137 Charles IV 79 Chatterjee, Partha 5, 10n20 Chiquinquirá 102 Chocó 16–​17, 25n20, 101 Colegio del Rosario de Santa Fe de Bogotá 59, 117 Colmenares 2, 9n6, 11n27, 24n4, 25–​7, 42n29, 83n32, 83n33, 84n50 Confederation of Provinces 101, 126, 128 Consulado de Comercio 57–​9 Corozal 120 Corrales, Manuel Ezequiel 5, 104n27, 105, 131–​5 Council of the Indies 37, 53–​4, 67, 94

Cristóbal Colón 29 Cuba 5, 10n19, 19, 22, 26n24, 46, 65n72, 65n73, 78, 88, 110, 115–​16, 122 Cúcuta 15, 130 Cundinamarca 101, 103 Curaçao 75, 77 Damocles, sword of 33 Darien, Gulf of 30, 39, 56, 75 Dávila, Francisco 96 Dávila, José 105n38, 111–​12, 131n13, 131n5 Díaz, Custodio 123 Díaz de la Madrid, Joseph 54 Díaz de Zuluaga, Zamira 2, 9n7 Díaz Pimienta, Juan 30 Domínguez del Castillo, José M. 90, 97 Domínguez de Tejada y Herreros, Gregorio 90, 97 Domínguez, Jorge I. 4, 10n15 Drake, Francis 37 Ducoudray, General 125, 127 Eastern Cordillera 15–​16 Eastern Plains 14, 17 Ecuador 1, 138 England 21, 34, 59, 75–​6, 78, 86, 104n9, 137 Enrile, Pascual 129 Escobar, Manuel 49 Escuela de Cargadores de Cádiz 47–​8 Eslava, Juan 113, 137 Eslava, Sebastián 35 Espriella-​González family 69 Europe xi, 19, 22–​3 Ezpeleta, Viceroy 56, 65n64 Ferdinand VII 92–​3, 103, 128 Fernández de Madrid 102, 126 Fernández de Moure, Francisco 33–​4, 63n37 Fidalgo, Joaquín 26n24, 27, 30, 40n8, 41n13 Fixed Regiment of Cartagena 46–​7 France 34, 81, 87, 94 Galleon Fleet 43–​4, 47, 62n5 García de Toledo, José María 70, 94–​6, 98, 109–​10, 112–​14, 117, 119–​24, 126–​7 García Olano, Manuel 90, 98

Index  155 García Rovira, Custodio 126 Garrido, Margarita 2 Germany 79 Getsemaní, neighborhood of 50, 109–​11, 115, 120–​1, 123 Girón 15 God 32, 57, 103 Gómez, Paulina Melchora 50 González, Santiago 87, 104n12, 123 Gordon Murphy trading house 79 Graham, Richard 3 Grahn, Lance 36, 42 Granados 121–​2 Gran Colombia 130, 138 Guacha River 20 Guaímaro 115 Guajira 29, 56 Gual, Pedro 127 Guanacos 20 Guardino, Peter 4 Guatemala 90 Guayaquil 16, 47, 101 Guha, Ranajit 8 Guirior, Manuel de 26n37, 27n41 Gutiérrez de Piñeres, Francisco 90, 116, 128 Gutiérrez de Piñeres, Germán 87 Gutiérrez, Miguel 114 Haiti xiv, 56, 61, 122, 125, 127–​8, 130 Hammett, Brian 4 Havana 33, 68–​9, 76–​7, 86, 98, 123, 137 Helg, Aline xiv, 5 Henao, Jesús 1, 9n2, 104n10, 24, 106n48 Herrera, Félix 52 Herrera, Lázaro M. de 87–​8 Herrera, Manuel de 98 Herrera y Vergara, Ignacio de 98 Holy Crusade 98 Honda 20 Humboldt, Baron of 20, 59 Ibagué 20, 101 Incera, Juan 113–​14 India xi, 5 Indias Mulatas 30 Jaden, Juan M. 86 Jamaica 19, 22, 75, 77, 88, 116, 129 Jiménez Molinares 105, 121–​2, 127, 132–​5, 147

Jovellanos 60 Juan, Jorge 42n40 Julián, Antonio 40n9 Kingston 114, 134 Konig, Hans-​Joachim 4, 105n46 Kuethe, Allan 47, 63n34, 83n48 La Bagatela 120 Labatut 139 La Catedral, neighborhood of 109 La Garita del Páramo 20 Lanz, Michaela de 49 Ledesma, Pedro 57 Lemos, Gil 67, 74, 76, 83n37, 137 León, Isla de 92, 112 Les Cayes 130 Liévano Aguirre, Indalecio 2, 9n4 Lima 12–​14, 25n8, 93 Llamas 107 Lozano, Jorge Tadeo 91, 97 Lozano, José María 91 Lynch, John 2, 5, 9n9, 24n6 Madariaga, Andrés de 94 Madariaga, María Isabel de 94 Magdalena River 14, 16, 18, 29, 73, 117, 125, 128, 139 Malambo 128, 139 Mallon, Florencia 4–​5 Manso, Antonio 26n32 Maracaibo 56, 101, 115 Marchena, Juan 24n7 Marimón, Juan 130 Mariño 125 Mariquita 101 Márquez, Remigio 123 Martínez de Pinillos, Pedro 116 Martín, Juan de Francisco 63n38, 114 Martín-​Martínez Aparicio Family 69 Masur, Gerhard 5, 10n21 Matanzas 110, 122 McFarlane 3, 9, 25n10, 26, 62n17, 63, 81n2, 82–​3, 105n46 Medellín 16, 20–​1, 24, 98 Mediterranean Sea 29, 89 Medrano, Pedro 6, 122–​3, 127, 130 Mendinueta, Pedro 26n33, 42n36, 42, 65n63 Merlano, Francisco 95 Mexico 8, 35, 43, 47, 90, 96, 102

156 Index Mier y Guerra, José Fernando de 31 Mint 103 Mompox 19–​20, 24, 32, 37–​9, 77, 80, 108, 112, 115–​17, 120–​1, 128 Mompox de Loba 16 Montalvo, Francisco de 127 Montes, Francisco 94–​5, 108, 111 Montilla, Mariano 127 Morales Duárez 118 Morillo, Pablo 103, 119, 128 Mosquera, Joaquín de 94 Moure, Juan Francisco de 33–​4 Muñoz, Ignacio 119–​22 Murcia 88 Mutis, José Celestino 72 Muzo 102 M. Van Heiningen Company 79 Nariño, Antonio ix, 3, 87, 91–​2, 98, 101, 120 Nariño, Vicente 90 Narváez, Bartolomé de 50 Narváez, Juan Salvador 87, 104n12 Navarrete, Melchior de 49 Nechí Valleys 31 Neiva 15, 101–​2 New Kingdom 21 New Spain 22 Nieto, Juan José 129 Noriega, Manuel Trinidad 107, 122 Nóvita 101 Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, neighborhood of 50, 64n45 Ocampo López, Javier 2 Ocaña 32 Old Castile 90 Opón 70–​2, 74 Orta, Carlos 43 Ospina Vásquez, Luis 8 Otro Mundo 72 Pacific Coast 17 Palacios de la Vega, Joseph 31 Pamplona 15, 68, 101 Panama 12–​14, 16, 25n8, 26n24, 30, 43–​4, 47, 59–​60, 101, 115 Pandey Gyanendra 5, 10n20 Pardo, Pedro 72 Paris 1, 75 Pasto 16

Patía River 16 Pedroza, Antonio de la 37 Peredo, Diego 54 Pérez, Benito 60, 65n78, 101, 114 Pérez de Vargas, Francisco 31 Peru 4, 12–​14, 18, 43–​4, 46, 96, 102, 118 Phelan, John 24n2, 63n28, 90–​1 Pimienta, Joaquín 54, 64n57 Piñeres, Vicente Celedonio 116 Piñerez, Gabriel 117, 119–​21, 130 Piñerez, Germán 127–​8 Pogonyi, Miklos 26n34, 62n26, 71, 80, 82n22, 132n36 Polo, Cristóbal 53, 64n54 Polo, Martín 53 Pombo-​Amador-​Arrázola-​Lecuna family 69 Pombo, Esteban de 59 Pombo, José Ignacio de 59 Popayán 2, 9, 14, 16, 20–​1, 24, 25, 59, 68, 80, 101 Porras Troconis, Gabriel 36, 42n37 Portobelo 30, 44 Posada Gutiérrez, Joaquín 51 Public Health Commission 123 Puente Real 72 Quindío 20 Quito 7, 12–​14, 16, 18, 25n8, 43–​4, 47, 54, 67, 80–​1, 87, 93 Regency Council 96–​7, 111 Regency of Spain and the Indies 92, 101 Remedios 29 Remolino 115 Republic of Colombia 7 Restrepo, José Manuel 1, 9n1, 65n78, 84n55, 99, 104n26, 132n26, 135n98 Ribón, Pantaleón Germán 116 Riohacha 36 Rionegro 16 Robledo, Francisco 90 Rodríguez, Pablo 53 Rodríguez Torices, Manuel 63n37, 65n70, 126 Rojas, Cecilio 123 Roland’s Cave 36 Romero, Mauricio 123 Romero, Pedro 6, 53, 109–​10, 114, 119–​20, 122–​3, 130, 133n58

Index  157 Royal Audiencia of Santa Fe 13, 53, 90 Royal Treasury 37, 46 Rublas, Manuel 121 Ruiz de Zenzano, José 37 Sabanilla 36 Salas, Governor 55 San Blas, Gulf of 30 San Felipe de Barajas, castle of 47 San Gil 68 San Jorge, valleys of 31 San Juan 86 San Martín 17 San Sebastián 31, 64n45 San Sebastián, neighborhood of 50, 52 Santa Catalina, neighborhood of 50, 64n43, 45, 122, 133n58 Santa Cruz, Count of 60 Santa Fe de Antioquia 16, 24, 98 Santander, Francisco de Paula ix Santa Rosa de Osos 16 Santiago de Cuba 26n24, 116 Santo Domingo 22 Santo Toribio, neighborhood of 50, 64n45, 109 Sarmiento 61 Scott, James 4, 10n16 Seven Years’ War 46 Seville 92 Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta 29, 31 Silvestre, Francisco 13, 20, 24n4, 24n5, 41n19 Simijaca 90 Simón Bolívar Peak 29 Sinú, valleys of 19, 29 Sitio Nuevo 115 Smith, Adam 59–​60 Socorro 15, 20, 24, 68, 82n11, 101–​2, 126 Solano, Juan José 109, 121 Solís, Viceroy 74 Soria, Blas de 88, 95, 104n16, 111 Soublette 125 South America 21, 44 Spanish America 13, 30, 33, 44, 49–​50, 59, 69, 89 Spanish Indies 46 Stern, Steve 4 Sucre 125 Supreme Central Junta 88

Supreme Governing Junta of Santa Fe 57, 70, 91, 97, 110, 116 Supreme Junta of Cartagena 54 Tenerife 53 Terga, Blas de la 74 Tienda de Cuervo, Bartolomé 13, 24n3, 37 Tierra Firme 30 Tierradentro 31, 36, 41n16 Tolú 30, 36, 125 Torices, Matías 126 Torre, Andrés Tomás de la 57 Torres, Tomás 107, 114 Torre y Miranda, Antonio de la 31, 38, 41n16, 18 Trava 107 Treaty of Paris 75 Tribunal de Cuentas de Santa Fé 88–​90, 97–​8 Tribunal of the Inquisition 44 Tunisia 29 Tunja 15, 24, 32, 68, 74, 101–​3, 126 Turbaco 127 Tutino, John 4, 10n15 Ulloa, Antonio de 44, 62n5 United Provinces of New Granada 101 Urabá, Gulf of 29 Urdaneta, Matías de 90 Urueta, José 5 Vargas, Pedro Fermín de 28, 31 Varte, Francisco de 57 Vélez 15, 71, 74 Venezuela 1, 3, 101, 128, 130, 138 Veracruz 68 Vernon, Edward F. 46, 53, 130 Villa del Rosario de Cúcuta 130 Villalonga, Jorge de 35 Villarroel, Manuel 72 Virginia 86 Virgin of Candelaria 51 Wade, Peter 7, 18, 26n21 Walker, Charles 4, 10n17 Western Cordillera 16 Zejudo, Antonio 108 Zipaquirá 72 Zúñiga y Lazerda, José de 35